Lockwood & San Emigdio Narrow Gauge

I haven’t talked much about my other railroad, the Lockwood & San Emigdio, a narrow gauge line that’s even more of a figment of my imagination than the B&V. It serves mining and logging areas at the east end of Lockwood Valley and a few miles to the east, around Mt. Pinos, Frazier Mountain, and the modern-day communities of Lake of the Woods and Pine Mountain Club.

Gold mining in southern California goes way back – the first placer discoveries in California, before the better-known Gold Rush up north, were in the Santa Clarita area not far south of the Frazier/Lockwood region. In the later 1800s there were placer workings and a few small mines around Frazier Mountain and Mt. Pinos, and an antimony mine on Antimony Peak with a cable tram carrying ore to a mill the base of the mountain.

In the late 1890s, a prospector named McLaren, poking around on the south side of Mt. Pinos, spotted a white crystalline material that looked similar to something he had seen at a mining exhibition in Los Angeles not long before. It proved to be Colemanite, a borax ore. He and his partner staked out a claim in 1898 in the hills on the north side of Lockwood Valley. The mining operation was soon sold to larger operators and three mines eventually were built along the ridge – The Frazier Borax Mine, the Russell Mine and the Columbus Mine. For a few years, this is said to have been the largest borax mining operation in the United States. Teams of eight to fourteen mules hauled the Colemanite to the railroads in Bakersfield or Mojave, from where it was shipped to processing plants in San Francisco.

According to the Ridge Route Communities Museum web site, “A sizable community developed at the base of the mines (at the north end of today’s Adams Trail) and was named Stauffer for one of the owners of the mine. The town included the mining operations, a calcining plant, stables, shops, post office and many homes and bunkhouses for the hundreds of men who worked there.

The mines where only active for about ten years, then very sporadically after that. Larger and more easily accessible deposits of borax were found in Death Valley and the Calico Mountains. There’s nothing left but piles of tailings today, though a friend who grew up in the area can remember when some of the buildings still stood and there were pieces of old mining equipment to be found.

The borax boom took place at the same time the B&V was under discussion. I assume that if the railroad had been built, borax would have become an important source of traffic; and with improved transportation, the mines would have stayed profitable and in operation longer. In my HO scale track plans, there’s a standard gauge branch from Lockwood (which I envision as being a few miles west of the borax mines, closer to a direct route to the Cuyama drainage) to the mines.

In a different alternate universe, this becomes a narrow-gauge line that interchanges with the B&V at Lockwood and continues beyond Stauffer to serve other customers – The Lockwood & San Emigdio.

There is other potential traffic for the railroad. A few miles east of Stauffer there is a quarrying operation, run by a company called Armalite but known to old-timers as Ridgelite. Among other products, it produces “rotary mud” used in the oil fields. Production reportedly began in the late 1930s, so it’s entirely logical that if the L&SE was still in operation by the ‘30s, this would have been a major source of revenue, hauling drilling mud to the oil fields in Ventura County and the south end of the Central Valley. Maybe enough so that the line would have been standard gauged to avoid transhipping the product at Lockwood. That’s more or less the situation in the HO standard gauge track plans for the Bakersfield & Ventura.

I imagine the narrow gauge L&SE following more or less along Lockwood Valley Road past the mines at Stauffer and the Ridgelite plant, through Cuddy Valley, where an early family of settlers still raises cattle, past the current community of Lake of the Woods, then north through Pinon Pines and Pine Mountain Club, ending at Mil Potreo. There were some small gold mines in this area that might have warranted a spur and an ore loading bin; and of course there was the antimony mill near Pine Mountain Club. Mil Potrero at the end of the line was the site of a lumber mill.

L&SE #1, still lettered for her former owner, Pocahantas Lumber.

I've always found narrow gauge railroads appealing, and have dabbled in HOn3 and HOn30 over the years, but found those gauges too small. When Bachmann came out with their reasonably priced line of On30 equipment I was intrigued, and I finally bought a few pieces of used equipment on eBay a few years back. I've repainted one of the ubiquitous Bachmann 2-6-0's for L&SE, along with a couple of passenger cars and so far, one gondola. I like the bulk of On30, and although prices have gone up quite a bit the last few years, I was fortunate to buy the 2-6-0, a Shay, and a 4-4-0 while they were still reasonably cheap; I have three or four boxcars, a couple of gondolas, and a flatcar, two passenger cars and a very nice side door caboose; I would need a few more freight cars, but not all that much. I'm quite tempted to build an On30 layout instead of HO.

4-4-0 #3 still lacks lettering.

Any of my Bakerfield & Ventura track plans would work equally well in On30; here's one of them, tweaked just a little:

In the Model Railroad Planning Annual 2016 that I just picked up (because it has an article about a layout based on the B&V) there is an article by a modeler who switched from HO to On3. He pointed out that we think of O Scale as being twice as big as HO, but that's incorrect -- because it's in three dimensions. So an O Scale building takes up not twice, but four times the footprint of HO: It's twice as long and twice as wide. And also twice as high, so it's eight times the volume. The picture shows a cardboard mockup I did of an ore bin, and it looks huge compared to one I built in HO years ago (Okay, you can't really tell in the picture, but trust me, it's big. If I can find the HO version I'll take another picture of them side by side so you can see the difference.). So that's another planning consideration -- when I allow space for the town of Lockwood, what would be enough room for a decent-size village in HO will be maybe two or three buildings in O Scale.