"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.








October 2010 Update: Natural Arch Special

Things have really slowed down on the layout in recent weeks, school and work really like to take my time this time of the year. I did get some work done on the Natural arch bridge though. For the fifth and FINAL time, I've redone the bridge to the proper specs and details and it looks better than ever. The previous version had to be adjusted so many times that it just couldn't survive being that it was a just a shell of celluclay. This time around, I decided to make it out of floral foam for a rigid and solid piece, but also to show how well this stuff works for how cheap it is ( 6 bricks of floral foam for $3; pretty good bargain!).

In my usual fashion, this rebuild was documented in time-lapse.



Just for the heck of it, here's a history of all the Natural Arch Bridges through the years:

First Arch: September 2005; nothing fancy, just an arch out of paper mache


Second Arch, (sort of) June 2006: a modified version of the arch above, to accommodate the Pack mule trail (shown here painted in May 2007)


Third Arch: During the big Winter of '09 Desert redo, the arch above was torn out and a new arch was built (look at the bottom):


Fourth Arch, June 2009 :That arch only served as a placeholder for a few months until the previous version was made out of celluclay


Fifth Arch, October 2010: Hopefully the last natural arch I'll have to create. This time out of floral foam with accurate details, accurate paint scheme, and enough path envelope for the train. 


That's it for this month's update; very short, but that's all I got going on, unless the Park's busy season's calm down or the midterms die down-- both of which I doubt will happen with winter approaching. But, as I always say, we'll see.




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