Skip to main content

The Mine Office


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 better, and it's more typical of buildings in Lockwood Valley, so I have ordered some corrugated roofing material and am awaiting delivery. The kit also has a roof over the porch, but I kind of like it without -- you can see more of the detail on the front of the building, and it feels a little more industrial. I left the porch roof off and covered up the slots in the front wall where the roof would attach -- a plank across the front doesn't look bad, and the sign also covers most of it.

The Frazier and Columbia borax mines were owned for most of their active years by Frazier Borate Company, which was in turn owned by Stauffer Chemical and other investors.

I followed the manufacturer's suggestion and rather than paint the cabin kit, I just weathered it with some diluted black, grey and brown acrylics. This caused major warping of the siding. Next time I'll try enamels thinned with paint thinner. 

When I placed the cabin next to the ore bin, the ore bin didn't look great by comparison -- I stained it with, if I recall correctly, MiniWax Provincial stain. This gave it a color similar to the color photos of the kit online, but it looked too red and clean on the layout especially next to the cabin. So I weathered it heavily, drybrushing it with grey acrylic, followed by some black, mostly vertical streaking. Looks a lot better now. See the pictures below for before and after.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another B&V Out There?

Doing some online research, I discovered a reference to another model Bakersfield & Ventura. This one was a track plan published in the Model Railroad Planning annual in 2016. I immediately ordered a copy, which I received yesterday. The other B&V was designed by Bryon Henderson, and built by Larry Kedes. The concept is similar to the John Armstrong San Joaquin & Southwestern track plan in his book, 20 Custom Designed Track Plans. It assumes a route from Ventura, following the real-life Ojai branch of the Southern Pacific, then continuing north along the route of Highway 33 -- different routing than what I am assuming based on my research. Because the owner wanted connections with the Union Pacific as well as AT&SF and SP, the concept also assumes that UP acquired an early, real-life shortline that ran from LA to Santa Monica, then also gained control of the Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles through Malibu to Oxnard. The track plan is focused on the coastal portion ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Did We Get Here?

I'm in the early stages (February 2022) of my second effort to model the Bakersfield & Ventura Railroad, as it might have been if history had been a little different ... or maybe as it is in some other parallel universe. There's more information on the real-world B&V in my other Bakersfield & Ventura blog  https://bakersfieldandventura.blogspot.com/  so I won't go into too much detail here, but in brief: The B&V was a proposed southern California railroad line that would have run from ... wait for it ... Fillmore to Maricopa. To be fair, Fillmore is not far from Ventura, and Maricopa is not too far from Bakersfield. The line would mostly have carried agricultural and petroleum-related freight between the southern San Joaquin Valley and the harbor at Port Hueneme, giving farmers and businesspeople a more direct and less expensive way to get their products to market.  In 1907, the company bought a small streetcar line in Oxnard, extended it to serve a couple...
Post a Comment
Read more