Welcome to the Bakersfield & Ventura Railroad Blog

Welcome. I am a long-time model railroader, and over the years have modeled a variety of prototypes, but in the last few years I've become interested in the Bakersfield & Ventura, which (had it met its promoter's ambitious plans) would have connected Ventura County, California, where I live, with the inland railroad center of Bakersfield.

In reality, the B&V never got very far -- just a few miles of street and industrial track in Oxnard and Port Hueneme. It lives on today, a hundred years later, as the Ventura County Railroad, a little switching line that connects the port with the Union Pacific (ex-Southern Pacific) mainline.

But I'd like to build a layout representing the B&V as it might have been. As I research available information on the line and its setting, I will share what I learn here, and if others who are interested in this ghost railroad happen on this blog, I hope you'll pass along anything that you know.

I plan to post maps and photos of the route as time permits, and pictures of my modeling efforts as they progess.

First, some background on me and my model railroad experience:

My first serious layout as a teenager was called the Palo Verde & Pacific. It had a vague “somewhere in southern California” theme. The PV&P was entirely steam powered. Mainstay of the roster was a Mantua Mikado built from a kit, with a Mantua 0-6-0 for switching duties; I later added a Roundhouse Atlantic and a Prairie.

During college and for several years afterward I drifted away from trains. That changed when I saw a neighbor throwing out a simple train layout that his sons had outgrown – a piece of plywood with an oval of sectional track. I salvaged that, and one thing led to another; eventually I built a 4x8 layout in the garage, this one a Southern Pacific branchline, no specific location. At this point I finally bought my first diesel, an Athearn Baldwin switcher.

When we bought our house a few years later I built a new iteration of the PV&P in a part of our garage. This was about the time that Atlas revolutionized HO motive power with their first generation of smooth-running diesels. Two of their RSC-4’s and an Alco switcher were the main motive power on PV&P2, later joined by a pair of Stewart F7’s. Like the first PV&P, the track plan was point-to-loop, and I also built part of a narrow gauge branch that never went anywhere. This track plan proved unsatisfactory – the main yard in particular was too small and poorly designed. I tried a series of bandaid solutions but eventually scrapped the layout and started over from the ground up.

I was getting better at layout design by this time, and PV&P3 started out well. At the same time I was building it, I was learning more about the history of Ventura County, where we now lived, and learned a little about the Bakersfield & Ventura, an abortive railroad project that would have connected Ventura on the California coast to Bakersfield inland – a concept close to what I had vaguely in mind for the Palo Verde & Pacific. About that time I also happened to pick up a Santa Fe GP-something, and sort of fell in love with it. When I was growing up our town was served by a Santa Fe branch and Santa Fe geeps were the locomotives I saw most often, so somehow those blue and yellow road switchers just looked right.

So PV&P3 became the Bakersfield & Ventura, early 1960’s, shortly after it was absorbed by the Santa Fe.

The PV&P Alcos were retired in favor of a series of Santa Fe early GP units; first a kitbashed Tyco shell on an Athearn mechanism, then the much better Proto 2000 GP 7’s and 9’s.

This layout got far enough along to be fairly well operable. I never built the second, larger yard, but loops on each end kept trains running. I adopted DCC, which made operation far more pleasurable.

However, the more I researched the real B&V, the more I realized that the layout really didn’t fit the concept very well. I drove most of the projected route of the railroad, hiked parts of it, took and studied photos, and most importantly, plotted the route on topographical maps. The locations I had modeled on PV&P3/B&V1 – Ojai, Matilija Creek, and Rose Valley – weren’t even on the “real” B&V, which ran about 10 miles to the east of where I originally envisioned it. The “real” route was in fact much more interesting, running through an area that has supported mining, logging, and agriculture from the late 19th century up to the present day.

I probably would have reworked the layout to roughly fit this concept, but other pressures forced me to scrap most of the layout about two years ago. The bright side that this gives me the opportunity to redesign a layout that fits what is now a very specific concept – freelanced, but grounded very firmly in real-world geography and history.

Ideally, the new B&V will represent the portion of the line from Fillmore (with a continuous-running lap for the SP connection) to San Guilliermo Summit. If I had the space, I’d put a large interchange yard at Fillmore and a loop and staging tracks at San Guilliermo. Biggest stop along the way would be Lockwood, where the B&V connects to a branchline to the mines at Stauffer and San Emigdio. I would also like to model the resort at Sespe Hot Springs, a lumber mill at Mutah and the little mining town of Lexington, with the Harris Mill nearby and maybe a tramway up Long Dave Canyon to Harris Mine.

I love the fact that all these names are real places I have been to and seen for myself, even if most of them are deserted today.

More likely, I won’t have room for all this. My scaled down version would cut the actual model back to just Lexington and Lockwood, with loops at each end representing the rest of the line, and at least a token San Emigdio branch.My interest in the early history of the area, together with the availability of good running, reasonably priced steam locomotives from Bachmann and others, has also led me to rethink the era; the next B&V will probably be set somewhere between 1910 and 1925, with steam power and smaller cars.