Bakersfield & Ventura Model Railroad

I carved a retaining wall from a scrap of EPS foam. Quick and easy. It's painted with cheap craft store acrylic paint. Here are a couple of photos. I'm using sand, harvested along the North Fork of Lockwood Creek, as my base ground cover. It looks fine to my eyes, but in photos appears much too coarse, like gravel. On my next build I plan to try sanded grout. The set of miners I bought includes this guy pushing an ore cart, which I finally painted and installed on top of the ore bin. At the other end, I poured Woodland Scenics Realistic Water so the prospectors could pan for gold. It's actually too clear; if I use it again in the future I'll add some of their Murky Water tint. Might even get some Murky Water and pour another layer over the top here. Next up, I just ordered a Banta Miner's Shack, which will sit just to the left of the ore bin. Also need to make up some pine trees from the Woodland Scenics kit I bought a while back. At that point, the On30 diorama wil...

I bought a set of miners on eBay, manufacturer unknown, and finally got around to painting a few of them today. These two are my favorites. They still need some detail work, especially their faces, but I'm pretty happy so far.

I have obsessively spent a rather ridiculous amount of time trying to duplicate the distinctive look of Big Sagebrush, a.k.a. Basin Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), which is the dominant plant around much of the Lockwood Valley.  At left is a bush made using the Harold Minkowitz method;  center, my Big Sagebrush. At right is one made the same way  but using brown fur and Scenic Express "Sage" colored foam.  It might pass as Yerba Santa, another common plant in  Lockwood Valley. Harold Mikowitz wrote about using fake fur to make bushes on his Pacific Coast Air Line Railway web site (www.pacificcoastairlinerr.com) and I tried his method. It makes good bushes, resembling dry season California chaparral, and I have made some that way and have a few on the diorama. It didn't look like the specific Big Sagebrush I was looking for, but I took that as a starting point and went from there. The main problem was color: Different sages and sagebrushes can va...

Added dirt and some vegetation today. The dirt is sand from the Lockwood Valley. If this was a working layout I'd be somewhat hesitant to use sand as ground cover, for fear it might find its way into locomotive mechanisms, but this is a mostly passive diorama, so not much of a concern there. The vegetation is Woodland Scenics and other brands of ground foam. I plan to add other plants, including some fake fur grass tufts and sisal twine reeds at the bottom of the slope. The background hills are coming out very blue in all my photos. I installed LED tape lights, which are giving everything a bluish cast that I can adjust for in software, but I can't seem to eliminate in the background. I may try swapping the cool white LEDs for warm white. Update: Now that I look at it, I think the problem is that I got carried away with the black wash on the background hills. They really are more grey than tan. I'm considering whether to repaint with the tan paint, then use a red-brown wash...

Got a lot done on the diorama the last couple of days. Did some more spiking on the track. Soldered leads and hooked it up to an MRC power pack. Trains don't have far to run, but they do run! Lowered the shelf about 1 1/2 inches, giving a little more headroom between the display and the shelf above. Added a piece of 1/8 inch hardboard, painted light blue, to the wall behind. Installed some LED tape lights on the underside of the upper shelf -- it makes a big difference! I bought the cool-white tape light, and I kind of wish I had gone with warm white. The cool white looks okay in normal viewing, but photos come out much too blue and need some tweaking in photo editing software. Added a few Woodland Scenics pine trees that I had on hand. These look to me pretty close to  the Pinon pines that are common in the area I'm modelling. I've ordered more. There are also a couple of small trees in the foreground, more like Scrub Oak or Manzanita, which are also common. I also ordered...

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...

  I started laying track on my On30 Lockwood & San Emigdio diorama. Ties are cut to length from 1/8 x 1/8 basswood strip and stained with acrylic craft paint. The rail is Code 70 salvaged from my old HO layout, spiked down with the last of my supply of Micro Engineering spikes. The turnout is also reused from the old layout. I had forgotten I had an On3 track laying gauge. Grabbed it, used it, then wondered why my the engine fell between the rails. Found the right gauge and relaid the track. Fortunately I had only laid a foot or so at that point. I'm now using a Kadee diecast three-point gauge that goes back to when I was a teenager, somewhere around 50 years ago. I've probably laid a few hundred feet of track with it, and the slots where the rails go are so worn that the track inevitably ends up out of gauge. If I decide to hand lay my next layout, I'll need to get a couple of new gauges. Have to say, old Number 2 looks nice sitting on properly sized track. So much so,...