"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: 1/20/09

Been doing some MAJOR work in the Balancing rock area. Got all the rocks made and installed, and they all move!! I pulled back some of the paper mache and installed some K'nex gears all powered by one Lego motor. All of these gears, 18 of them, power seven columns of rocks, each with a piece of flexible plastic tubing in them. In this plastic tubing, a metal rod bent at different angles is driven by the gear and the different bends in the rod as it turns moves the rocks. The plastic tubing basically protects the inside of the foam from the metal rod and it keeps the foam rocks from spinning with the rod



Here's a video of the rocks in action:



They are a little shaky, but that is because they haven't be permanently installed, they will run a little smoother when they are installed permanently and the "ground" is put back in.
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Progress Report: 1/18/09

Been working on the back corner of the layout yesterday. I still need to make some adjustments on it after reviewing some photos though.



Shot with the train making the curve.



The next step after this is to start on the balancing rock canyon. I'm probably going to start on a prototype today to see if my technique will work (Each teetering column will have a rotating vertical rod with bends in it; as the bends move through the rocks, the rocks will move in a sorta random way, resulting in more animation than more older ones with the string and the spring movement)
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