Freelance - History

[mlehman]

Since most railroads connect with other railroads, picking your connecting lines, route and location to be modeled seems like a good place to start. You at least know wheere you're at, where you go, and what the terrain is like that your fantasy railroad has to build over.

If you don't want to worry about interchange, pick an industrial line. These usually have a distinctive, limited mix of equipment that gives them a very specific look. They can be about anywhere, from an isolated island to in the middle of a big city. These are a great idea if you're constrained by space and have to build a mini-layout.

Another very easy thing to do is proto-freelance. In my own case, I have a successor railroad, the Silverton Union RR, that represents the merger of the three Mears lines -- The Silverton, the Silverton, Gladstone and Northerly, and the Silverton Northen -- that ran north out of Silverton from their connection with the Rio Grande. All the info I need on the route is from the prototype, and many of the structures, but bringing these lines forward into the future, in my case the mid-50s to mid-60s, allows me to run a different mix of equipment and make the modeling easier than modeling the prototypes, which used earlier equipment that would require extensive scratchbuiling. I can use lots of hand-me-downs and interchange rolling stock and motive power from the Rio Grande and other by then abandoned lines, as well diesels.

In my case, I've stuck with narrowgauge (HOn3) for this part of my layout, but another idea is to use an abandoned narrowgauge line as a starting point, presume instead that it was standard-gauged due to an increase in traffic, and do things that way. I've actually stood this idea somewhat on its head. My Durango, instead of being narrowgauge, presmues that a standard gauge Rio Garnde line hooked up to the short-lived and oddly isolated standard gauge branch that ran to Farmington before it was narrow-gauged in the early 1920s. Thus, Durango is mostly dual-gauge on my layout, a lot like Alamosa or Salida was on the prototype. I would have liked to have had either of them on my layout, but there just wasn't space, so I remade Durango's history. Of course, it's all Rio Grande there, so we're starting to stretch the proto-freelancing paradigm a bit.

[GUB]

For those who freelance a railroad do you also develope, write, invent a fictisious history to go along with thhe railraod? Just curious.

GUB