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New Blog

What started out as a blog about my past and maybe future Bakersfield & Ventura model railroad has ended up being mostly about the narrow gauge Lockwood & San Emigdio. So I'm spinning off a separate blog for my narrow gauge work. I'll go back and clean this one up eventually, then put it on hold until I get back to working on the B&V.



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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...
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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-...
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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 exhibitio...
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