"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.








April 2013 Update

A brief update for April, as the layout is on the back burner under a backlog of other side-jobs. However, the photography is quite good, so hopefully it's enjoyable.

Although installed over a year ago, I finally got the geysers spruced up enough to be filmed for YouTube. Blew off the dust and added a coat of Mod Podge to make them appear "wet" once again.


When it got dark out for night shooting to show of the lighting effects, I took some real great long exposure shots



And here's the video, seeing the geysers in action!



Something a little more new, over in Rainbow Ridge: Performed the first lighting test for the Load area lanterns. This was done by just crudely tying the wires together to the LED flicker controller I built two updates ago. Everything seems to work pretty well, so more should come with few bumps.



I've also begun the process of adding the railings to the deck made out of strip styrene. 


The lanterns at night, via long-exposure shots. 




To show off their flickering, here's a video of the lanterns under power.