Owner Inspiration and Techniques on Granite Mountain Railway

Doug, the Granite Mountain shares the layout with the Denver and Rio Grande Western, the Burlington Northern, Milwaukee Road, the Union Bay Railway and Navigation Company plus your narrow gauge line, the Granite Mountain and Pacific. How do all these things work together? That's a lot of stuff. Yeah, it is. They all work together with interchange, that's the key. They all feed out of staging yards, and then they come up on various places in the layout, and then they all tie together via interchange, either small one or two cars track to be able to hold that much or a small yard, but it's interchange, and that's the way the various railroads can swap cars back and forth between each other. Well, do they share trackage rights? Obviously, you can't have a separate line for all of those roads. Well actually, we do. The only one that shares trackage is the Milwaukee, but the other railroads, the Rio Grande and the Santa Fe and the BN, they all have their own trackage and also the short line, the Union Bay Railway and Navigation Company. Well, your layout is not loaded with track yet you have all these different lines on there. How did you accomplish that? You know, that's something all of us want to do is have- I mean, a lot of us have more than one layout. that's our favorite, one railroad. Right. And that's, how did you do that? What advice do you have for the rest of us? Well, get lots of space. Well you've got that, I know. That's an easy answer. Just make sure that the railroads look like they belong, that the track you put down has a purpose. It's not just track as for track sake, but it does something. It's a piece of interchange or it goes into an industry or it's a way one railroad hooks into another railroad. You model Washington State and Colorado with this east-west bridge route concept, yet you're not trying to duplicate any specific area. So tell me about how that works and what the advantages are and disadvantages maybe and things we can watch out for. Well, I'm a freelancer. I mean, that's maybe not too usual these days in the hobby. It seems like people are more prototype-oriented, but I guess I've liked the freelancing to be able to kind of do whatever I want. I can play management, I can decide paint jobs. I can decide what kind of rolling stock we're gonna need, what kind of motive power, and I can put on the management hat and say no, I really don't wanna spend the money on this, but then I can also turn around and put on the labor hat and say why don't you fix this? Why don't you get us this kind of engine? We need this on the railroad to help us move freight. So I try to do a lot of that kind of imagination in my mind when I plan the railroad and when I try to build things for the railroad. The layout room is huge, 42 feet by 43 feet by 23 feet. Most of us don't have that much space, and even that much space wasn't enough for you. You went and triple-decked it in some places and double-decked it in others, and most most double-decked layouts are for small spaces. Why did you decide to double deck such a large area? I guess 'cause I wanted more area than what I had. I mean, that might sound facetious, but it's true. We knew we wanted a big railroad. We wanted mainline railroading, and I had been involved in a club before this, the Houston Society of Model Engineers in Houston, and they had a very large layout, and I really got hooked into operation there, and I saw that to get prototypical operation, you needed to have a big layout to be able to run the trains, to be able to feel like you're got distance between towns and that kind of stuff. So we decided very early on in the game to multiple-level the railroad. We had built, I had helped a gentleman build a multiple-level layout before, so spirals weren't a foreign thing to me. We had cut our teeth, so to speak, on that layout. We had a double-decked layout in the sense, too. There was two levels, not three as we did on ours, but at least two, and that gave us the experience of being able to build it, being able to engineer the supports, that kind of stuff. Also be able to design a double-level layout in the sense that you've got to worry about people flow. Yeah. You don't wanna put a yard right underneath a big town, for example, because now, you're gonna have to deal with a lot of people and people congestion, and frankly, if you're gonna have an operating railroad like we've got, you've gotta be able to deal with people. You have large aisles. Oh yeah. You're blessed with that, that was very- But in a sense, sometimes they get too small. When we get 14 or 15 crew downstairs, they can sometimes get congested. So we've done a lot of planning to make sure that the railroad, that the traffic flow of people can move around the railroad well. Well, a triple-decker, I've never seen that before. That's most unusual. I mean, a double-decker is sort of out there in the state of the art kind of thing, if you wanna call it that, in model railroading, but a triple-decker's sort of exceeding that. Did you approach that with some fear, trepidation? Well, not really. No? You're self-confident. Well, the triple deck is not triple deck in terms of three levels of completed scenery. The bottom level, the very one that's only about 15 inches off the floor, is actually the staging yards. So that's where we get the triple level. Now, there's two decks above that staging yard then that have fully sceniced areas on it. So I guess the trepidation or fear that triple level was gonna be too much, too overwhelming for us, I guess we never really even thought of it.