Bakersfield & Ventura Model Railroad

I came across a few old slides of my former layout (late '80s-early '90s), the Palo Verde & Pacific. Here a a few shots for the historical record. The locomotive is a first-run Atlas/Kato RSD 4/5. The signal you see in two of the photos is a scratchbuilt LED signal actuated by a homemade Twin-T detector.

The last major component on the L&SE diorama is this Banta Modelworks Miner's Cabin next to the ore bin. I had to do a little surgery on the hillside to make a spot for it. The Banta cabin is a nice little kit. I made/am making a few modifications. Because the building is going to be on a hillside and partly on piers, I added some 12x6 scale timbers underneath -- this is similar to how the cabins are built at Camp Three Falls in Lockwood Valley, where I have spent a lot of time. I believe part of the idea is that if the building needs to be moved, it could easily be skidded onto a flatbed. That would make sense for a mining structure as well. We don't want anyone falling off the elevated porch, so I added a railing on the front and one end. The stairs will go down the other end. Banta makes this kit in several scales. The O scale and smaller versions come with simulated tarpaper roofing, but the F/G scale version has corrugated metal. I like the look of the metal roofing be...

As my Lockwood & San Emigdio diorama is getting down to the details, I'm thinking about doing something in HO, with enough track to do some switching. This was spurred in part when I came across an old track plan called the Gum Stump & Snowshoe. It was originally designed by Chuck Yungkirth, a pioneer model railroader, in the late 1950s or early 1960s. His version was a 1 x 6 foot shelf, kind of a tour-de-force microlayout/switching puzzle. I spent some time fiddling with it in Anyrail, expanding it from the original 1 x 6 feet, to 16 inches by 7 or 8 feet. Here's his version: One of the criticisms of this plan is that there's no run-around track, so switching all the sidings with a single engine is virtually impossible. But I believe this was intended as a two-engine switching puzzle, with two engineers having to cooperate to complete the switching task. Still, I'd want to add a run-around because I'd mostly be running it by myself. Here is is redrawn with ...