"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: 2/3/09

Nature's Wonderland is now in a different room! This is the second move for the layout, and through negotiations with other members of the house, I was able to obtain a larger room for the layout (and eventually, a larger table twice the size of the old will be underneath the layout and will house a new "crawl-through" attraction in the future). This will allow for extra expansion room around the layout, so that will give me plenty to do.

But in the meantime, the rocks have been painted:




The train heading through the canyon. "Now folks we gotta get through balancin' rock canyon, look out they're startin' to tumble!"





I'm planning to do a time-lapse video of the construction of the rocky portal tunnel show above, to show all the steps that go into these rocks. Also planned is an ambitious time-lapse video of the entire construction of the Rainbow Caverns from blank masonite to finished black-lit cave. So those will be neat if I get to them and actually do them. I'd do more video documentation, but that is almost twice the work for a project for one person. But we'll see.