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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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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 ...
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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...
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