"Howdy Folks! Welcome to the little mining town of Rainbow Ridge, the gateway to Nature's Wonderland"

This is my documentation of my miniature re-creation of the long-gone Disneyland attraction: Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland. This is a selectively compressed model railroad, in On30 scale at 5' X 7.5' that has been in progress since September 2005. In May of 2016, I finally got the layout to a point where I declared it "finished".

I started the layout when I was a sophomore in high school with basic skills and over the years the layout has been improved and reworked in drastic ways to match my ever improving model making skills. In fact, since I started rebuilding the sections to better quality and standards, I've actually created a whole new layout, piece by piece.

This is a stand-by basis project without a deadline, so it tends to hit the back-burner a lot due to other things with higher priorities. But whenever I can, I'll give an update when there is something worth talking about. All of my updates since day one are here, which include photos, videos, and plenty of rambling notes and descriptions.








Progress Report: 10/29/08

NWRR #1 is finally complete except for the whistle. This is the most accurate that anyone that I know of has gotten to modeling this difficult in such a small scale off a stock model. You can see the running boards that aren't suppose to be there, but there is a reason why they are. I think its a good "railroady" compromise. The goal for this rebuild is to make the top removable for what ever reason. So if I have a problem or need to oil the motor, the boiler and cab can come off with ease. Also for the first time, the train actually has a operator!



The wires you see sticking out the bottom (sorry for my bad show) will soon connect to ALL the cars that will supply extra pick-up power (thats a lot of pick-up points; 24! ) that will allow for a lot smoother operation, let alone the 90 degree cross.





Yellow is really hard to match. I printed about 20 versions of the tender graphic to get it to match well. Its all trial and error when it comes to doing decals this way. The sand dome graphic was easy since I still had the decal graphics files in the computer and the red paint for my G scale Kimball so I was to get it in one print (they use the same paint and the same color red in the graphics).
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Progress Report: 10/27/08

Work has been going on on the locomotive and train. I can't do much on the rest of the layout until I get a full, completed train (That would be a new station platform, possibly redo of the desert, etc.)

A shot of the engine, under construction, you can see where the new scratchbuilt cab will be mounted.




Sides of the new cab, built from scratch. An idea for a new thread could be on model construction techniques, such as here the left cab piece is made of strip styrene, while the part on the right, is made from sheet styrene.






A course in computer graphics is paying off well, since I've been redoing the tender art in Photoshop (Adobe Illustrator would be better for this) from the ground up, since J. Keeline's photo of the tender is not quite suitable for printable (even though I've used it before on older tenders. It is good reference though). It still needs some more work.


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