Marty Bradley’s Oakhurst Railroad

• Scale: HO, G
  
• Era/Locale: 1920’s and 30’s / Sierra Nevada Mountains of California
  
• Size: “L” shaped, 4’ W x35’ L, with additional staging area (open)
  
• Benchwork: 9 x 11 ft. and Outdoor 40 x 50 ft.
  
• Track: 100% completed
  
• Scenery: 100%
  
• Control: Digitrax DCC Indoor, Outdoor - DC and Piko radio control
  

The Oakhurst Railroad is a two-level branch line point-to-point railroad with a helix, an optional continuous run, and an operational “connection” to an outdoor garden railway.  A complete round trip train run can be up to 6 scale miles.  For operations, trains are put together in the Oakhurst yard and then travel to the logging or mining areas on the upper level and some “connect” to the outside garden railway. Logs are taken from Camp 6 in the garden to the North Fork sawmill indoors. Cut lumber and freight are taken to Oakhurst for interchange with a Southern Pacific branch line that connects to the mainline in Fresno (staging).  Passenger trains take guests to and from the Yosemite resort in Wawona and the campground in the garden at Happy Camp.  A complete run with some of the trains can take more than 2 hours. For the transition from inside HO to outdoor G-gauge, a fleet of similar car types inside and out are used and waybills and log loads are swapped at the connecting point at Camp 3.  The layout was featured in the July 2016 issue of Model Railroader and the March 2024 issue of the NMRA Magazine.