Paramount Ranch was a short-lived 1:1 racetrack in the Los Angles area of California. It was a small, tight track that was considered a driver's track, but was  viewed as unsafe to both cars and drivers.  It was in operation for less than three years.  Despite it's short life, many famous names raced there during it's short life.  However, the Paramount Ranch has remained a popular routed slot track. The reason for that popularity is two fold:

1. It remains the only North American racetrack that was built with a crossover (bridge), which equalizes lane length for slot tracks
2. Back in '66, Paramount Ranch was the prototype track for a series of 12 articles in the long-departed Car Model magazine, entitled "How to Build a First Class Home or Club Track".

The slot track articles were written by Robert Schleicher, who currently publishes Model Car Racing magazine, and is the author of a number of books on slot cars. A 2002 book of his, Slot Car Bible, has a chapter on building routed tracks, most of the information being drawn from his Car Model articles.

While many of the materials, methods, and tools in the originally series of articles are out-of-date today, the articles still have a great deal of good information in them. If you wish to build a track based on the articles, you will need to adapt the materials, methods, and tools to their modern equivalents, etc.  Instead of using a "Yankee screwdriver", use a power screw driver.  Instead of particle board, use MDF, etc.   Figuring out what needs to be updated is not very difficult. There are many, many pictures, explanations, and other useful information in those articles.

Almost unbelievably, the articles are available online, in VSRN-Online (VRSN stands for Vintage Slot Racing Newsletter). Here is a link to the Paramount Ranch articles on VSRN.

The articles in VRSN are good-quality full-page scans of the original magazine articles. However, each scanned page is a large file (250-550k per page), and each page must be downloaded separately.

Professor Motor has CD versions of the VRSN magazine and scans of old slot racing/car modeling magazines for purchase in their book section.

Interestingly, there is a current Car Model version of the Paramount Ranch track: The Leadmine Raceway.

For what it's worth, I really don't like the chapter on routed tracks in Slot Car Bible. Mr. Schleicher gives the impression that he does not like routed tracks, although he says of the Paramount Raceway he built "...I feel to this day that it was the best home track I ever raced on." One other thing from the book; Mr. Schleicher feels that the track needs to be longer. He originally wanted the track to be 5x20', but had to limit it to 5x17' because of a doorway.

-- Bill

PS:  For more information on the 1:1 track, check out both this link and this link.

A book -- Paramount Ranch Remembered was published in 2006, and is available through Amazon.