Inspiration Behind the Utah Midland

What gave you the idea for the Utah Midland? I think I was reading in some of the magazines about a situation where, it's the Rio Grande and the Utah Railway actually share a canyon in Utah, Proper. And I should say that this layout was not always a coal-hauling operation. Like so many other model railroaders, I started out with too much track. And the only way really I could justify having this much track in this density was probably to have two railroads, or at least have a situation that might exist where two railroads were actually pursuing the coal within one canyon. Oh, so you put the track down, then you decided, well, I wanna justify my track placement. That's about it, yeah. We've all been there. Well, how does it tie in with the Utah Midland and the Denver and Rio Grande Western? How does that all tie together? Well, I tried as much as possible to emulate the conditions in Spring Canyon, Utah, which is where, as I mentioned earlier, the Utah Railway, which is pure coal hauling, survives now. But they used to compete with the Rio Grande branch in the same canyon. And I thought, well, hey, this is tailor made for me with all this track. And so, essentially what I did then was probably I'd say 12, 15 years ago was when this layout started gravitating toward being a coal hauling railroad. The Utah Midland basically hauls coal, it's about a 20 mile short line. Hauls almost, it didn't have to send strictly coal. So it services mines and brings the coal to the yard. Yard, and then the yard, once the loads are accumulated there, the Rio Grande track is just the outlet to the world and its upgraded almost all the way to summit. Layout will contain better part of two railroads. The longer upgrade expanse that you'll see is primarily the Rio Grande branch line. And it actually exists at the top or the summit of this canyon or this area of Mueller Pass. And that is kinda the connection with the outside world in theoretically that particular branch goes onto connect with the Rio Grande Proper probably in Castle Gate. And essentially when the loads are taken out to summit or to the interchange with the Rio Grande, that's when the little plastic loads are taken out and they come back the next day as empties anyway. So it facilitates operation I think to do it that way. Not too many people model Utah, why Utah? Well, it started out there weren't very many decent tree kits on the market anyway and so I really didn't need them to model Utah. This is similar to an area in Carbon County, Utah, they don't have anything but sandstone and maybe some scrub pine and a lot of underbrush. And so, it was ideal for that standpoint, so I figured, and it had a certain charm of its own. I mean, it was not that you really needed to put a lot of trees in there. One time, there were trees in the early stages, I should say they weren't trees, they were more like the usual liken blobs. That we all call trees. But in fact there's still a couple of them on the layout someplace, in the unreachable parts or something where I can't get them out. Utah is really a very, very beautiful state. I think that a lot of the sandstone bluffs and everything are particularly unique, and they lend themselves to being easily modeled, at least for me anyway in terms of sculpting and forming the plaster, that sort of thing.