Hello everyone,
I was looking through some of my Model railroader magazines and was inspired by the desert scenery of the UP salt lake route, but am not crazy about the prototype. Does anyone know of any other modern western prototypes for a layout?
Thanks,
sfb
Hi there,
Depends on what your prototype is, I started with the Amtrak, BNSF and Metrolink Surfline towards San Diego but I have moved to present day Donner Pass which which has Amtrak and UP power.
Julian
Are you thinking specifically about desert scenery? If so, I’d take a look at the BNSF “Transcon” through Southern California, Northern Arizona and New Mexico. There’s a great variety of ‘desert’ scenery on that route, even some forested mountains around Williams and Flagstaff, Arizona.
The West is a lot more than ‘desert’, however. If you’re thinking of mountains, there’s the BNSF and Montana Rail Link routes through the northern Rockies, BNSF’s two trans-Cascade routes into Washington, BNSF’s extremely spectacular north-south “High Line” between Northern California’s Feather River Canyon and Washington’s Columbia River gorge.
As far as ‘modern’ western railroading, though, the major routes are split pretty much between BNSF and UP. If you were modeling an earlier period–say the 1960’s or '70’s, you’d have railroading choices like Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Milwaukee, Rio Grande, Southern Pacific, Santa Fe and of course Union Pacific, with even the Burlington tapping into the Rockies east of the Continental Divide. The West contains three of America’s great mountain ranges–the Rockies, Cascades and the California Sierra Nevada. So there’s a lot of territory to cover out here. Right now, however, that territory is pretty evenly split between UP and BNSF.
But even thirty years ago, there was a lot more variety.
Tom [:D]