colorado – PhotoKent's Musings

Flew to Denver with some buddies in April for 3 day weekend of running model trains, railfanning and seeing others layouts

Originally scheduled to fly from Seattle, when we cancelled our Camano island farm trip I scrambled to purchase flight on United. Had planned to use alaska air miles but now have a large charge on credit card. Oh well.

So now an early morning wake up call and drive to SMF airport. Find a parking spot and head to airport

I am meeting several buddies in Denver. Mark and Dwight from Atlanta, Phil from Tucson, AA Pete and Mike from Portland. We will stay at same hotel in Longmont, and attend same 3 model RR operating sessions. Should be fun. A couple of the guys were late in arriving thanks to airline delays. Seems to be the norm these days.

We first visited Pat Lana’s n scale CRANDIC model railroad based in the Iowa. Lots of fields and cows and green trees. It is all about 5 feet off floor almost at eye level. It’s completely in the center of the basement room not touching any walls. Full walk around.

After a quick dinner we moved over to Harry Lindsey’s Los Pinos HO scale layout. Harry is also a classic car collector. Has 6 of them. Fun operating layout and Harry a great host

Stayed overnight in Longmont Saturday morning we drove up to Cheyenne to operate on the Wasatch & Union Pacific NScale model railroad built by John Rimmasch whose career is in restoring old steam engines and rail cars.

Icing on the cake after lunch was a visit to the Cheyenne railroad park to see the biggest engine in the world, the Union Pacific “Big Boy steam engine. Only 25 were ever built back in 1941 just before WW II.

In Greeley, Colorado, we visited the Colorado model Railroad Museum, an amazing HO scale layout in a 10,000 sq ft building based upon the Oregon California and Eastern (OCE) The OCE runs between Klamath Falls to Lakeview, Oregon. It is a fictional representation of a real railroad with a lot of creative license. The builder turned the whole operation into a non profit museum run with volunteer help. For more info visit https://www.cmrm.org/

We visited a couple more layouts in the evening

We spent Sunday morning operating on an amazing layout. A BN or Burlington northern RR set in 80’s. The owner built the house over that layout. Quite amazing. Takes an hour to run from one end to the other.