ok, so i followed January’s article to John Armstrong’s article (http://www.trains.com/mrr/default.aspx?c=a&id=3621), and now I’m trying to find some more info about the prototype railroad. Does anyone know of any info on it, print or online?
It’s not a real railroad. It’s an imagineered version of the Denver & Rio Grande Western with some spice from a half-dozen other Colorado railroads thrown in.
There really was a Pueblo and Salt Lake RR. It laid 85.34 miles of track from West Las Animas (on the line of UP predecessor Kansas Pacific RR) to Pueblo between 1874 and March 5, 1876. While an attempt was made to build through the Royal Gorge toward Tennessee Pass, the D&RG-Santa Fe ‘war’ pretty well stopped the enterprise.
Since the Santa Fe had built into Pueblo from the south, the only thing the P&SL did was add operating expenses to a mountain of unpaid construction debt. In 1878 the Las Animas branch was sold at public auction for $50,000 (to the Kansas Pacific, which promptly lifted the rails for use elsewhere) and the P&SL dried up and blew away.
20 years later part of the right-of-way was used as the route for an irrigation project.
It was very definitely at one time a real railroad. However I would guess the model has very little resemblance to the rail thing. As an example I intend to model the Pueblo & Arkansas Valley Railroad but brought forward to 1950s as if the “Treaty of Boston” had gone in favor of the Santa Fe instead of the Rio Grande.
FYI -
Meade’s Manual of the Santa Fe Arkansas River Division states:
The Pueblo & Arkansas Railroad Company (Santa Fe) bought out the Pueblo & Salt Lake Railroad Roadbed and laid their track into Pueblo, arriving in Pueblo with the track February 29th, 1876.
He also states the Kansas & Pacific and the P&SL had parallel lines from Las Animas to La Junta. The track of the UP from Kit Carson to Las Animas & La Junta was taken up in 1875.
The Pueblo & Arkansas Valley was a Santa Fe subsidiary to build and meet the Santa Fe tracks coming west through Kansas. The Pueblo & Arkansas Valley merged with the Canon City & San Juan and is the railroad that really built the famous hanging bridge on the Arkansas which the D&RG gets so much credit for.
The History of Colorado Volume I (by Fiske) states that the Kansas and Pacific reached Las Animas in October 1873. the Pueblo & Arkansas Valley Railroad, the Colorado & New Mexico, and the Pueblo and Salt Lake paper railroads were consolidated into the Pueblo & Salt Lake Railroad.
It gets tricky when
The Pueblo & Salt Lake
The Pueblo & Salt Lake Railroad
The Pueblo & Salt Lake Railway
are all different things.
And on a side note, personally, I would never call the Kansas and Pacific a predecessor of the UP. It came after and was UP venture from the very beginning. It was authorized by the US Congress in the Pacific Railway Act as the 2nd more southern transcontinental line. Originally to join Kansas City to Fort Riley and then a