The Million Dollar Question, Part 4: Why "The Denver Road 2000"?

Well, in other posts I've made references to being a BN fan, and an ATSF fan, and to growing up in north central Texas.  So as to why I chose "The Denver Road 2000", it may not be any more complex than that.   But I'll indulge you and go a little deeper into things to give you more perspective.

First of all, you may be wondering....what does "The Denver Road 2000 even mean?".  Pretty good question, and I bet many people don't really get it, even though they may think they do.   Many times I've used the term Denver Road on forums and folks think of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway.   But actually, The Denver Road references the Fort Worth & Denver Railway, which was a railroad that was originally part of the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy system and formed the heart of a Denver, Colorado to Texas Gulf Coast line.   The line was also known as the FW&D Ry. or simply FW&D.  An interesting note: due to corporate financing reason the FW&D (and sister Colorado & Southern) lasted to the early 1980's during the first half of the Burlington Northern's reign.

The Fort Worth & Denver proper ran from downtown Fort Worth northwest to Amarillo and met the C&S at the Texas-New Mexico state line near Texline.   The line south out of the Dallas/Fort Worth area was the "B-RI", which was jointly operated with Rock Island.   The Fort Worth to Amarillo line is the area of interested, as it ran through my hometown of Bowie, TX, as well as Wichita Falls...home of my alma mater Midwestern State University.   So my earliest memories of real railroad action was big BN locomotives operating over what was then still the Fort Worth & Denver.  I spoke about this in another post, so I won't elaborate except to say that essentially once this line became BNSF, it truly combined a lot of the things I loved about modern railroading, and became very desirable from a modeling standpoint.

So, "former FW&D lines, during the BNSF era," became the theme.   Which part of the BNSF era is something I've been trying to refine ever since.  I initially chose 1997-1998, but eventually pushed it out further so that I could run key BNSF rolling stock and locomotives.   It went to '98-'03 and has pretty much stayed there for some time.  It would slide a year or two but overall has stayed solid.  I've generically used "BNSF 2000" or "BNSF Turn-of-the-Century" as a way of not committing to some specific time-frame, but I've also settled on a very specific date--June 2000--as my primary focus.

I really love the "Denver Road" moniker, so Denver Road 2000 is a good way to describe what I'm trying to accomplish, with a nod to the history of the line.