Skip to main content

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.


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