Game Design Thoughts - Researching where the research is

 

I continue to work my way through what I consider to be one of the main features of any game, 18XX or otherwise, that features railroads in Colorado; mountain passes. I acquired a book last week, "Great Surveys of the American West" by Richard Bartlett, and while the focus was, indeed, on railroad surveys it was more on the surveys developed for the transcontinental railroad rather than the surveys for the railroads that would build into the Colorado Rockies. It is still an interesting book just not quite what I was looking for.

Another "book", more of a pamphlet really, provided quite a bit of useful information, but it would have been a lot more useful if it had included the map that had accompanied the original survey. The rather long winded title is "Union Pacific: Report of F.M. Case, of Surveys of Cache La Pondre & South Platte Routes and other Mountain Paeese in Colorado". And I intentionally left the misspellings in the title. Pondre should be Poudre (in Colorado we pronounce that as pooh-der) and Paeese should be Passes. Fortunately those errors were introduced by the printer that reproduced the report and you can find it all correctly spelled on the internet. Its quite a fascinating little document and it shows the difficulty in researching some subjects. For instance one of the passes explored (actually not explored) is Boulder Pass. On a modern map you are unlikely to find "Boulder Pass", with a little digging you will find Boulder Grand Pass in Rocky Mountain National Park but that's not the Boulder Pass in the report. The Boulder Pass mentioned in the report is what we now call Rollins Pass. Rollins pass was on the route used by the Denver & Salt Lake Railway before the Moffat Tunnel opened in 1927. The pass has had a number of names since its discovery including; South Boulder Pass, Boulder Pass and Corona Pass (I don't know which one is first, and Corona Pass seemed to be a later attempt to rename it from Rollins). I was verify the actual pass  from the USGS publication "Historic Trail Map of the Denver 1° x 2° Quadrangle, Central Colorado" by Glenn R Scott. There are a number of these historic trail map publications by Scott and I have most of them in PDF but I would love to get my hands on the physical publications (of course, no longer in print). Which brings me back to the map. There was a least one map that went with the F.M. Case survey report and perhaps two. Getting my hands on that map would help me determine if there is a viable railroad route into North Park from the Fort Collins area as he actually redlines potential railroad routes that may be worth surveying.

As I have mentioned before, in these game design ramblings, I do feel that the use of mountain passes and the restriction it causes in building viable routes is very important if you are going to capture the feel of railroading in Colorado. One of the things that bothers me with Ryan Driskel's "18CO, Rock & Stock" is how much track gets laid in northwestern Colorado and how little is laid in southwestern Colorado based on the in-game progress pictures that I  have seen posted. Granted I'm restricted to what has been posted, but like a lot of 18XX games there are patterns that tend to be very consistent. To be fair I have not played Ryan's version yet so I don't have first has hand experience with his game at this point. I am viewing  it from the lens of how the railroads developed in Colorado and development in the northwest was very light and it occurred very late in the Colorado's development. I back this up from a document I found written for the United States Department of the Interior National Park Service titled "Railroads in Colorado 1858-1948. There is a sequence of maps in this document that shows the development of the rail network in Colorado.

1870 Map
All maps are screen shots from the Department of Interior Document and originally appear in the Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History by Donald B. Robertson

1875 Map

1880 Map

1885 Map
Finally a connection to the west, but not a true transcontinental route as it connects Grand Junction with Denver via the Denver & Rio Grande and then to points east over the larger railroads like the Union Pacific.

1890 Map

1910 Map
This is the first map that we see activity in the northwestern portion of the state. The Denver & Salt Lake Railroad opens in 1902 and crosses Rollins pass in 1903 to finally break into northwestern Colorado looking for a more direct route to Salt Lake City. It never advances beyond Craig 

1915 Map
This is pretty close to a "finished" version of the rail network in Colorado. After this there are mostly realignments, mergers and major abandonments.

This sequence of maps reveals a couple of things; the development of the rail network was primarily north to south in the early years, then expanding east to west to create a secondary transcontinental route which would eventually hook back up with the Union Pacific in Utah. The mining industry was the big driver for the railroads, first for silver (central Colorado), then for gold (central and southwest Colorado) and later for coal (northwest Colorado). The question becomes how to really drive an 18XX game to achieve something that is both somewhat historical and fun to play. And those are only the first elements that need to be dealt with. I'm still thinking that the map needs to come first and then the rest can follow.