"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: 6/2/09

Progress slowed just a tad, but stuff is still going on. Worked on the Natural Arch bridge. This is the fourth incarnation, with the first one built on the original layout in 2005, rebuilt in 2006 for the added mule path, torn out and replaced with the big Desert redo of winter '08, and then replaced yet again with the current one (the one before it, even though was brand new, gave me some envelope clearance issues).

The new Natural Arch Bridge is made out of a rigid wood structure draped in aluminum foil and then covered in a layer of celluclay. Celluclay is dry papier mache type material that turns into a malleable wet clay when water is added. Even though it take a few days to dry, it forms a very hard and appropriately textured surface. Here is the bridge already with a layer of set celluclay on it--the light colored stuff-- and some fresh stuff applied today--the dark. (Look you can even see the big 'ol bag of dry celluclay in the back; this stuff ain't cheap--$25 a bag! But hey, it works pretty good)



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