"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.








August 2011 Update-- Or Lack of Update...

There won't be anything for the August update, many because nothing really happened. I haven't had the time lately to do considerable progress on the layout, as I'm in the middle of a major studio renovation, which includes the dismantling of my 20,000 Leagues under the Sea project directly below the layout. When my work space gets back in order over the next few weeks, work will return to the Wonderland, hopefully. There are a few things I've got cooked up for the layout on the horizon, one of which is a very promising solution for animating my geysers, something that has been long-time in the making.

2 comments:

Snow White Archive said...

Loved your 20,000 Leagues project. Did you sell it to a collector or is it just time to move it out of your studio?

September 1, 2011 at 2:43 PM
Sam Towler said...

It was time to move on; 20k ran it's course, and did it well, but I was ready for the next thing. I was ready for space for new things and well, more space in general. That project, in terms of size, was massive, taking up the majority of the room. While Nature's Wonderland did sit on top, eliminating the project below opened up more space for me to work (in general and on the layout) as well as room for a bigger work bench and drafting table. I didn't sell anything; I removed the scenes and striked everything else. The scenes I felt were the best were completely preserved intact. The others that didn't have the same punch or looked better in pictures are now history. I did save a lot from it. I'll have more on it later on the 20kmodel blog when I get to it.

September 1, 2011 at 3:19 PM

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