I have just gotten back from the Grand Canyon and was in awe. No words can describe the beauty of the canyon.
I took some pics of the two trains that took my wife and I up to the canyon and back.
I will post the pics so all of you can see the engines and the passenger cars we went on.
Santa Fe Buff
not only don’t words describe it , most pictures don’t capture it either , they only get close . best of all is hiking down to the bottom and looking back up [:)]
If you do hike down, be sure to follow all of the safety tips, especially the one about carrying LOTS of water. When the rim is pleasantly cool the inner canyon is hotter than the lee hinge of Hades, and there aren’t any water holes on the trails.
Judging by the number of ‘tracks to nowhere’ in front of the station building at the Canyon, the track layout must have been much more complex back when.
Modeling hint for a fairly narrow shelf. Tracks and platforms to the front. Fully modeled station building (it’s not very big) with half-width street behind. Low-profile models of the line of hotels. Canyon views on the backdrop, lit from inside the shallow buildings to avoid shadows. (The North Rim is a lot higher than the South Rim, so this is legit.)
Stepping back seventy years or so, add loco service facilities for oil burning steam, subtract the more recently built hotels, put plenty of trees between the road and the rim, add freight traffic (especially box cars and reefers, with the occasional tank car of oil.) Then put The Grand Canyon on the rails, Pullman green heavyweight cars with an open-platform observation-lounge car. Glorious!
Chuck (who has very fond memories of the Grand Canyon, some very recent)
A few years back, I interviewed for a job as one of the cowboys that holds up the train on the return trip to Williams. In the end, my wife did not want to move up to Williams (or Flagstaff) from Phoenix so I reluctantly declined the offer.
Hindsight being 20-20, I should have put her on a train to Siberia and taken the job in Williams. It would have been fun working with a tourist railroad.
Do they still have outlaws robbing the train?
yep, they still got the outlaws!! How did you mangage to get that offer anyways??
About 8 or 10 years ago, a guy who knew another guy who knew another guy (you know how that goes) saw me in a movie, magazine article or something. I don’t remember which but they contacted my agent who in turn, told me to get my carcass up to Williams before they lost interest and offered the job to some wild desperado like Pee Wee Herman 
I worked as a cowboy at a Disney dude ranch and knew the whole guest-entertainment routine. It would have been a no-brainer…uh, not that robbing tourist trains takes much intelligence anyway…but definitely the perfect job for me.
There are three books written on the trains to the Grand Canyon. I, of course, couldn’t resist and had to buy all three. It really makes one want to model the AT&SF. Steam power, E1s, Zebra GPs, freight FTs, passenger Fs wow. The only thing I wouldn’t know how to fit on a shelf layout would be the wye.