{"id":20380,"date":"2023-02-14T14:32:43","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T19:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/?p=20380"},"modified":"2023-02-14T14:32:43","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T19:32:43","slug":"the-san-diego-model-rr-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/20380","title":{"rendered":"The San Diego Model RR Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My post Clovis-flyabout time in Arizona was uneventful: some time boondocking near a ghost town and a week and a half at Kartchner Caverns SP. I&#8217;ve driven by signs pointing the way to KCSP for years and never bothered to look into it &#8211; turned off by eastern tourist trap caves I guess. This time round, I was looking for a campground near the southern AZ grasslands and gave KCSP a whirl. The campground in nice, but OMG the caves! Discovered in 1974, kept secret for 14 years, and developed prioritizing the cave environment; just incredible. If you visit when the bats are elsewhere (they close part of the cave during bat season), the Big Room tour is my recco.<\/p>\n<p>From S AZ, it was off to San Diego. I had 2 spots on my high priority list. The San Diego Model Railroad museum was the first. They have multiple layouts: O, HO and N &#8211; I was there for the La Mesa Model RR Club&#8217;s HO scale Tehachapi layout. So, early on a Tuesday morning, I hopped on my bike and pedaled to Balboa Park. My plan was to be there when they opened and get some more-or-less quiet time before it got crowded. Ha! By the time they opened, I was one of a couple dozen people at the front door. It got crowded quickly and I&#8217;m still crowd-averse so I only spent and hour and a half or so inside, but it was time well spent.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tehachapi_Loop\">Tehachapi Loop<\/a> is a famous track spiral in south central California. By spiraling, the railroad gains horizontal distance so that it can keep the vertical grade manageable, but the v cool visual benefit is that any reasonably long train ends up passing over\/under itself. The La Mesa folks have modeled it, and modeled it\u00a0 well. I read somewhere that this layout is the largest model RR representation of a prototype in the world.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a title=\"Headed west to the loop.\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/doncoyote\/52689081361\/in\/datetaken\/\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/31337\/52689081361_74613f9cb3_z.jpg\" alt=\"Headed west to the loop.\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" \/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">A westbound freight headed by 2 SP SD40T-2 tunnel snoots bracketing a UP <a href=\"https:\/\/www.railpictures.net\/photo\/486234\/\">U30C<\/a> with an SP SD39 bringing up the rear.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a title=\"Through the loop!\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/doncoyote\/52689604668\/in\/datetaken\/\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/31337\/52689604668_ac3ce87d00_z.jpg\" alt=\"Through the loop!\" width=\"622\" height=\"640\" \/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">The same train running downhill through the loop.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a title=\"CTC panel\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/doncoyote\/52677739239\/in\/datetaken\/\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/52677739239_3fca9c9635.jpg\" alt=\"CTC panel\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">And just for grins, a shot of one of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Centralized_traffic_control\">CTC<\/a> panel displays.<\/p>\n<p>Between the museum, Balboa Park and a very interesting waterfront bike ride, an A+ day.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My post Clovis-flyabout time in Arizona was uneventful: some time boondocking near a ghost town and a week and a half at Kartchner Caverns SP. I&#8217;ve driven by signs pointing the way to KCSP for years and never bothered to &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/20380\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infrastructure","category-making-things"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdqxx-5iI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20380"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20386,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20380\/revisions\/20386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}