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The layout is an around the wall style with a middle island, it occupies a 15' x 45' basement room along with a small workbench area.
Construction began in the summer of 1996 with the construction of the room and the workbench area. Shortly after that was finished, the first benchwork went up and track was layed in Harlowton. Since then, work has slowly progressed . By the sumer of 1999, all the mainline track had finally been installed and operations had begun.
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Towns
The layout includes the Montana towns of Harlowton, Three Forks and Alberton as well as Avery, Idaho. If you were to hop an imaginary train to tour the layout, you would get on at Harlowton and travel west. The frst point of interest tha you would encounter would be the beautiful Eagles Nest tunnel and the tall steel trestle spanning the valley outside the east portal. After that we come past the stock yards at Three Forks and stop at the depot to change crews. Leaving Three Forks to continue west, we pass the Jefferson River and plunge into a short tunnel. Coming out of the tunnel we find ourselves in Alberton stopping fr another crew change. The westbound grade stiffens to 1.9%, so helpers are also added at Alberton if needed. Just west of Alberton we cross the long bridge at Cyr which passes over the Clark Fork River and US 10. At the west end of Cyr bridge we enter another tunnel. Emerging from the west portal of this tunnel, we find ourselves in the Bitter Root Mountains of Idaho decending another 1.9% grade into Avery. Before we get to Avery however, we cross three tall steel trestles and slide through two more tunnels. Upon arival at Avery, we change crews once again and remove the Little Joe electric from the head end so it can be turned and sent back east on the next train. With our diesels we continue to head west out of Avery through another tunnel into a 6 track double - ended staging yard. If we would continue west through the staging yard we would find ourselves once again entering Harlowton .
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Modeling Philosophy
My goal in building this layout was not to operate trains in a realistic manner as much as it was to recreate some specific scenes from the Rocky Mountain Division. In my attempt to recreate these scenes realistically I also created the towns as close to prototype as possible. After doing this I found that I had unwittingly reaped the benifit of having a trackplan that worked out very well for operations, so without specifically planning for it , I accidentally created a very operational layout as well.
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Modeled Era
The era of my layout is the early 1970's, more specifically, late 1973. I chose this time period because it will let me realistically run new SD 40-2's with Little Joes and a few ancient Boxcabs. Another benifit of this time period is that the Milwaukee had heavy traffic as a result of trackage rights into Portland , Oregon granted to them as a condition of the 1970 merger that formed the Burlington Northern Railroad. I do not follow my time period too strictly however, because I have a few steam engines as well as a Bi-Polar locomotive that I like to run as well.
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