The New Great Western Railway is the follow-on to the previous combination Colorado and Southern and Great Western layout. Retirement has brought the opportunity to "do it right" and the Great Western Railway is the perfect prototype for this endeavor. The C&S will still play a part in the new layout but will be relegated to a supporeting role.
After getting settled in Oregon, we built a dedicated train room to house the new railroad. A large 24' x 32' stand-alone garge/workshop space was built and a track plan was developed that represented the northern districts of the GWR. The "givens and druthers" of the new layout focused on an accurate model of the area with as much fidelity to the prototype as the space allowed.
The Colorado and Southern Railway represents the Colorado Front Range in the late 1960s and models the area from Denver to Ft. Collins, including the towns of Longmont, Berthoud and Loveland. A hidden staging yard holds trains that come and go to points north (Cheyenne) and south (Pueblo).
Since we have retired and are moving to Oregon, the C&S Front Range Division is now a fallen flag. The layout was dismantled in February 2009 after 24 enjoyable years of construction, modeling and operations. It seems unlikely that the C&S will reappear in a future location as I am anticipating less layout space in our next house. However, I hope you enjoy this look at the past.
The Great Western Railway is a short line sugar beet hauling branch that is based in Loveland, Colorado. It includes the towns of Loveland, Windsor, Johnstown and Milliken. The model GWR connects with the model C&S in Loveland (as does the prototype) but it is a separate layout in all other respects.
The Great Western is also a fallen flag. However, I plan to resurrect this interesting part of Northern Colorado in our future home. The current version did not reach a state of scenic or modeling completeness but was a joy to operate. I intend to apply all I have learned over the past 24 years to create a more finely detailed Great Western with the same level of operating enjoyment.
The Georges Gorge and Karlaton (GG&K) was my first layout since high school and was a learning exercise for things to come. The layout was a freelanced version of the 1970s Burlington Northern Railroad. What started out as a classic spaghetti bowl design evolved into a decent operating layout when I developed a taste for operation. I was lucky to have an excellent group of model railroaders around to help tune the operating scheme.
A major improvement to the layout was the addition of the branchline with its two mine areas: a classic coal mine (Kampf Mine #3) and a modern facility modeled after the Climax molybdenum mine outside of Leadville, CO (the Ore Chasm Mining Company). Plans were in place to expand the layout and reduce the spaghetti-ness but we decided to move to a much bigger basement with an attached house. A few peices were salvaged to be used on the new layout.