Thirty years on Three decades of modeling at San Diego’s La Mesa PHOTOS BY BILL SCHAUMBURG UNLESS NOTED


(April, 2001). It was one of a series of three articles (March, April and May) that covered an introduction to the San Diego Model Railroad Museum at Bal- boa Park and looked at the model rail- roads there. A lot has changed in the past ten years, and all the layouts have moved forward. Some exhibits, like the O scale layout and the O gauge tin- plate layout, have been replaced with


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little over ten years ago RMC published an article titled “Twenty years on Tehachapi”


new ones or have been substantially upgraded, and today the San Diego Model Railroad Museum has become one of the most-visited museums in the park. This article focuses on the railroad


being built by the La Mesa Model Rail- road Club. Each club works on its own exhibit, and the goal of the La Mesa Club remains to build an HO model of the Southern Pacific line from Bakers- field to Mojave with as much fidelity to the prototype, circa 1953, as possible.


This, of course, is the famous route over Tehachapi Pass, now owned by the Union Pacific with BNSF having track- age rights, a carry-over from the Santa Fe’s tenancy on these tracks. Much progress has been made toward the re- alization of that goal over the last ten years. The plan had always included ex- panding the railroad to and beyond Tehachapi Loop, a defining feature of the route, but getting there would re- quire building “up” as well as out, and


MARCH 2012


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