For 6 months or more I have been working on updating the Denver’s RailRoads track plan. Initially I wanted to improve the Denver rail yards and to provide UP and CBQ with their own yard (be it that they had to share) separate from Rio Grande’s North Yard. I then decided that I had too much yard and not enough scenic hills and mountains. To rectify this issue I decided to move the East Denver Belt Line and replace it with Rio Grande’s Big 10 Curve and Pinecliff station. This will give me a large open area of mainly just scenery, which the layout plan was lacking.

In order to re-establish the East Denver Belt Line industries I (a) deleted the Cherokee power station from East Denver and replaced it with the, now discontinued, Arapahoe power station in South Denver, (b) kept the Koppers crossties and utility poles operation in the corner of module 7 and (c) abandoned the Globe Smelter. All of the other industries, including Denver Union Stockyards and the Conoco Refinery, will fit between the new Rio Grande and UP/Burlington yards. In real life they are in that location but not so compressed!

I also improved the entrance and exit to the Salt Lake City return loop and staging tracks and their relationship with Glenwood Springs and its industries (which really exist but unfortunately are not railroad served). On the Craig branch I also swapped out the Springboat Springs station stop for Phippsburg and added the Edna mine which was the prototype for Walthers New River Mining Co kit, which I plan to use.

I finally got fed up trying to run trains at low speeds over the Peco scissors turnout and decided to replace it with a Kato unit. During the dismantling of the Peco unit I found one of the wires to one of the Dual Frog Juicers was broken. This was almost certainly the reason why Locos would not cross the Peco scissors at slow speeds without stalling. However I decided to continue with the swap as I saved 4 point motors and 2 dual frog juicers for future use. The Kato unit is a single point motor which throws the rails to either straight through, or crossed. How simple!

I did a few more jobs before Perth’s 40 degree plus Christmas drove me indoors! . . .