Skip to main content

More Details

I carved a retaining wall from a scrap of EPS foam. Quick and easy. It's painted with cheap craft store acrylic paint. Here are a couple of photos.


I'm using sand, harvested along the North Fork of Lockwood Creek, as my base ground cover. It looks fine to my eyes, but in photos appears much too coarse, like gravel. On my next build I plan to try sanded grout.

The set of miners I bought includes this guy pushing an ore cart, which I finally painted and installed on top of the ore bin.


At the other end, I poured Woodland Scenics Realistic Water so the prospectors could pan for gold. It's actually too clear; if I use it again in the future I'll add some of their Murky Water tint. Might even get some Murky Water and pour another layer over the top here.

Next up, I just ordered a Banta Miner's Shack, which will sit just to the left of the ore bin. Also need to make up some pine trees from the Woodland Scenics kit I bought a while back. At that point, the On30 diorama will be pretty well complete.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Side-Tracked, Continued

I was cleaning my garage the other day and pulled out a 30x60 inch layout I started some years back in HOn30, but abandoned pretty quickly. The trains were just too small for me, and there wasn't a lot of equipment available -- there's no equivalent of Bachmann's relatively cheap and plentiful ready-to-run On30 cars and locomotives, and only a few kits. I'm kind of taking this as a sign from the fates. The overall size of the old, partly built layout is in the upper range of what I was thinking about doing in On30. The curve of N scale track at the left end in the photo is 12 inch radius, and the right end is 13 inches, both in the range of what I was considering. The rest of the track plan doesn't translate so well -- the plan drawn on the board has a passing siding on the front side that would have been short in HOn30 and would have been all but useless in On30. The upper level branchline track has a 9 inch curve, which is probably too tight for anything but an 0-...

Side-Tracked

The other day, as my wife and I were rearranging some furniture in the living room, she made the comment that it might be fun to put a small train display on a side table where she normally displays some potted plants. She had in mind my Lockwood & San Emigdio On30 diorama, which she's watched me work on the last several months -- but of course, the suggestion got me thinking in other directions. Since the purpose, at least in part, will be to entertain the grandkids when they come to visit, it makes sense to have a continuous lap. Since the tabletop is only about 25 by 54 inches, that limits me to a 10 or maybe 11 inch radius, a bit more if I overlap the tabletop a few inches. I'm thinking On30, so that's too tight for any of the equipment I currently own. There are some people doing wonderful work in On30 building mini- and micro-layouts with these kinds of curves and smaller, using the Bachmann 0-4-0 and 0-4-2 Porters, Davenport gas-mechanicals, and other small switc...

Towns of the B&V

As originally proposed, the Bakersfield & Ventura would have run from a connection with the Southern Pacific at Fillmore, about 25 miles from Ventura, to Maricopa on the Sunset Railroad, about 40 miles from Bakersfield. The Sunset has an interesting history in itself and would make an interesting subject for modeling -- see information about it here:  https://www.abandonedrails.com/sunset-railroad . In reality, the B&V built about 10 miles of track from an SP interchange in Oxnard (near Ventura) to the harbor at Port Hueneme, with plans to eventually build its own line from Oxnard to Fillmore. This line, now known as the Ventura County Railroad, continues in operation today. The real world B&V served two communities, Port Hueneme and Oxnard, including some passenger street operations in Oxnard. If the extension to Fillmore had been built, it would have passed through the farming community of Saticoy and the larger town of Santa Paula before reaching Fillmore. This is ea...