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I haven't had much to say here for some time, as I have been building a couple of small On30 layouts, but I've recently been thinking about jumping back into H.O. with a Bakersfield & Ventura project.

I don't know that I will ever have the space to build the largish B&V layout I posted about a couple of years ago, but I could probably manage a 4 x 8 representing a small piece of it. I started looking at Iain Rice's Lilliput Logger plan, with the idea of building a version in On30, but Rice originally designed it for H.O. My slightly modified plan would work either way, with nothing more than changing the track spacing on the sidings. With H.O., I could also lower the elevation at Stauffer a little, to ease the grade a bit.

In this draft, haven't even bothered to change the station names. The On30 version represented a narrow gauge line connecting to the standard-gauge B&V in Lockwood Valley, somewhere around the present-day Grade Valley Road, and running east to Staffer and beyond. In H.O., it's a standard gauge line that does the same thing; the oval is a short segment of the B&V main line, and the branch is the Stauffer line.

I've played around some with reconfiguring the left side to have a hidden storage siding parallel to the main oval, but so far haven't come up with a satisfactory configuration. The area of my garage on the Stauffer/Cuddy Junction side of the layout has storage shelves along the wall, and while the space is mostly unavailable for railroading in the foreseeable future, I could quite conceivably extend the "possible expansion" track along one of those shelves as a semi-hidden, semi-accessible storage track. On the drawing below, I've reconfigured the Cuddy Junction area to put that track at the front of one of the storage shelves.

As drawn, the mainline oval on the left (top of the full-room drawing) is 20 inch radius, and the one on the right is 21 inches. I might try to bump the tighter curve up to 21, especially if I add a storage siding parallel to it on the inside of the curve. Even at 20 inches, it should accommodate my Bachmann 2-8-0 and 4-6-0 steam locomotives, and Proto 2000 GP7 and GP9 diesels that would be my main motive power on the mainline. The branch, with its 15 inch radius would probably be worked by my Atlas Alco switcher at first, or maybe a steam tank engine in the future, and would be limited to 40-foot or shorter freight cars

My foray into On30 has give me more of an appreciation of the possibilities of small layouts, and I'm even thinking it might be fun, to build two versions of essentially the same track plan, one in H.O. and one in On30, representing two alternate realities.


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