Down The Road

So I'm gonna play optimist here and presume that I will build my "dream layout" Denver Road in N and that it will serve me well and I will have many great successes with it and will have a good ops group that will benefit.

Yet, I do believe such a layout WILL have a life span, if for no other reason than a possible change of address.   So when/if that happens who knows and whether or not Denver Road N would move too.

But supposing a significant restart, what would be next?  In this post I will tell you.  :-)



I spend countless hours over the course of months/years researching and trying to put together as accurate of a BNSF Denver Road layout as I can conceive.  However, I have always appreciated the "Protolanced" model railroad, layouts such as the Utah Belt or the Missouri, Kansas, & Quincy.   So I've slowly developed my own concept and figured I would document it here a little bit.  It certainly still needs a lot of work, but here is what I have so far.

I've always been a fan of the Montana Rail Link, and also had great interest in the Colorado & Wyoming Railroad.  Throw in other elements of Front Range/Rocky Mountain/Powder River railroading, including things like the Coors brewery in Golden, CO and the Cumbres and Toltec Narrow Gauge Railroad, and that is pretty much what I envision...a "Regional" railroad with influence from all those areas.

Features Include:

1. A "Livingston Rebuild Center" type setup, whereby my "Regional" inherited a large but defunct locomotive shop from a larger Class 1, and turned it into a business line for refurbishing/remanufacturing locomotives.  Also known as a great reason to house any number of all types of locomotives on a railroad that normally might not see them.
2. "Mountain Brewery". Obviously patterned after the Coors brewery in Golden.  I like beer, and think it would be a cool nod to a really great and somewhat unique piece of western railroading.
3. Cumbres & Toltec-type Narrow Gauge tourist railroad.  I envision this having a very quaint station/museum and yard very much like the C&T or the Durango & Silverton does, and then a run that winds in and around a mainline run for a bit before branching off into a peninsula of its own with really majestic scenery in contrast to a more plains/plateaus kind of thing for the regional, or something along those lines.
4. Kiweit Mine.  One of the treasures of the Internet was a gentleman (who's name escapes me at the moment but I will come back and update it asap) that works/worked for BNSF in Montana and documented some of his work "adventures".  One of my favorite stories he told was that of Kiwiet Mine (sp?) whereby he was dropping empties & pulling loads (a dozen or so) of coal hoppers using a single BN SD9.   Well, he ended up betting some of the workers at the loadout regarding his capabilities with that single locomotive of pulling the entire string of cars and it was just a really cool story that got me hooked.   The mine itself is reminiscent of the Walthers "New River Mining" structure.
5. Other Coal industry.  In addition to Kiweit, I also ponder the idea of incorporating a little "DM&E" into the equation, whereby my regional got financing and grants to build a line into the heart of the PRB, so access to the big strip mines there would yield some unit trains.  Dunno, just a thought.
6. Grain Elevators.  I want at least one significant grain elevator facility, and naturally there will be one adjacent the brewery as well.   May have one or two smaller steel facilities as well depending on space.
7. Other Possible Industry.  A Corn Syrup Facility, a refinery/sulfur plant, carbon black plant, steel mill/steel supply company, and drilling mud loadout are all things that come to mind.

One thing I want to avoid is trying to replicate very specific places, cities, landmarks, etc.   Rather, I want a generic representation of a real element of Western/Northern railroading.   I think that will be one of the biggest challenges....trying to pull it off as authentic without having something someone can sink their teeth in and say "yeah, that looks like _____, good job."   Maybe as the concept develops further I can indeed attach it to some reasonable real life route...not necessarily a railroad route just something that would seem feasible...possibly in the form of a way old fallen flag/abandoned ROW or something.

I would also strongly consider changing scales, and have been leaning toward the idea of O-scale for a variety of reasons.  That would of course require a huge area to work in.  But as grand as those plans above sound, I expect them to all be very selectively compressed and consolidated in the end.  So a medium size O-scale layout would probably be the result.   HO or S are not out of the question either...nor is N-Scale.