A look back at the Lompoc & Cuyama

When my layout was first built, it was in my basement in Pittsburgh, PA. I imagined it as a short line, running from the Southern Pacific main line which runs along the coast, at a real place called Jalama, then crossing the coastal hills to the Santa Ynez Valley and the towns of Ballard and Los Olivos. I also conceived an upper deck over one side of the layout, to have a bit of mountain climbing to reach Cuyama. 

That layout was among the ones featured for the 1990 NMRA National convention in Pittsburgh, and an article I wrote about it made the cover of the June 1990 Railroad Model Craftsman (article on pages 64–69). That cover is shown below, comprising a photo of the SP main line on the layout. Note that the cover artist added the inverted-kite shape of the L&C logo.

After careful study of USGS topo maps, I figured out a possible rail line from the SP junction to Los Olivos, then a line via Foxen Canyon to a junction with the Santa Maria Valley Railroad at Sisquoc, then up La Brea Creek Canyon and over the summit of the Sierra Madre range to Cuyama. (The railroad was imagined as intending to continue on eastward to Bakersfield, but never got that far.) By my modeling era, the line had been cu back to Alpine, where two mines were served. 

The track arrangement as I envisioned it is shown below. It was “E”-shaped, in a 16 x 19-ft. room. As noted on the drawing, Los Olivos  and Alpine never got built, beyond a track board and a single length of track, but I did built the upper level area at Piedras Blancas, with track leaving the L&C main line at Ajax Junction. 

Scenes along the layout in those days have been  shown at various times (you can use “L&C” as the search term in the search box at the top right of this post). But I wanted to show a few others that I enjoy. Here, for example, is SP Consolidation 2763 switching at San Luis Obispo. The upper level trackage at Piedras Blancas lies at upper right. 

I often photographed trains at what was then Jalama (now re-named Shumala with a re-purposing of the layout as an SP branch line). Here, for example, is a train departing for Ballard, with L&C caboose 54 on the rear end. Some will recognize this as a brass model of a Yosemite Valley caboose; for a somewhat  amusing detail about these cars, see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/08/whimsy.html ). 

Just ahead of the caboose is an L&C box car, also with the inverted-kite logo. The double-sheathed wood box car, L&C 194, was scratchbuilt.

During those days, I built a lot of that layout (though there was certainly a bunch more to do), and the peninsula in the middle of the “E” shape became the core of my present layout. But occasionally I still think fondly about the short line I once modeled.

Tony Thompson