The Venice Miniature Railway was a long miniature railway in the 1:3 scale with a gauge of , which was in operation from July 30, 1905, to February 13, 1925, in Venice near Los Angeles in California.
Location
Trips on the loop track started at the locomotive shed at the corner of Lake Avenue and El Camino Real (now Venice Boulevard and Abbot Kinney Boulevard) in a clockwise direction along Mildred Avenue towards the Business District. There the trains looped around the Post Office and again followed Mildred Avenue, until they crossed several canals on Riviera and Rialto. Finally, they turned sharply onto Washington Boulevard. They used El Camino Real to get back to the Lake Avenue Station and the locomotive shed.
Cost
The cost of a trip around Venice was five cents. Regular users could buy a book of tickets for $1.00, which reduced the cost to only two cents per trip. At the same time, a one-way ride from Los Angeles to Venice on the Los Angeles Pacific Railway cost 15 cents.
History
Abbot Kinney, who had come-up with the plans for Venice of America, contracted John J. Coit to build a miniature railway in Venice Beach near Los Angeles. Coit had worked as a master machinist at the Johnson Machine Works and had already built and operated the Eastlake Park Scenic Railway with a gauge of in Eastlake Park (now Lincoln Park).
John J. Coit owned the oil-fired steam locomotive No. 1903 of the 2-6-0 type with an overall length above the couplings of . This locomotive made use of some technical innovations such as controlling the valves without an eccentric, which made it easier to adjust and maintain them. It had been successfully used on the Eastlake Park Scenic Railway, but at a bit too light and not powerful enough for the planned activity at Venice. Therefore, Coit ordered a oil-fired steam locomotive of the 2-6-2 (“Prairie”) type at his former employer, the Johnson Machine Works, into which his innovations had to be integrated.
The new, nearly-identical steam locomotives No 1 and No 2 were called 1-Spot and 2-Spot. After Coit had issued the engineering drawings, he contracted the Johnson Machine Works for the manufacture. The boilers were made and supplied by the Pacific Coast Boiler Works in Los Angeles and were fit for a pressure of (12 bar). The locomotives had a Walschaerts valve gear and cost $4,510 () each. They were painted in black with polished brass bands and silver lettering. The only difference between them was the shape of the windows of their cabs: 1-Spot had rectangular windows with rounded corners at the top and the upper part of 2-Spot's windows was crescent-shaped. The maximum speed was .
The railway used ten passenger coaches in an elaborate Venetian style with lion's head ornaments on their sides, which had been supplied by the J.G. McLain Company for $400 () each. Five of them were painted in royal blue while the remainder were painted in cherry red. Each of them had twelve seats, and they were typically assembled to unicoloured trains.
Disagreements
After a good start there was an increasing animosity between Kinney and Coit. Kinney insisted on his two very young sons being involved in the rail road. The eight-year-old Carleton was nominated as VMR President (at the time he was lauded as being the youngest railroad president in the world) and the twelve-year-old Innes as Chief Engineer, which dishonored Coit's actual position. When Kinney wanted to get more control over the day-to-day business in Venice, he tried in 1906 to take over the railway from Coit, although they had both signed a five-year contract. He forced the railway to close down for six months during the summer, allegedly because one of the wooden bridges needed to be replaced by a concrete structure.