Switching Warehouse Districts - LA to Denver

I have been doing the research for a couple of months now and have decided that I'll be switching from the LA Warehouse district and the ATSF to the Lower Downtown (Lodo) district and the D&RGW.  After pouring over Sanborn Insurance maps, pictures, websites and a couple of books it looks like Wynkoop street between Cherry Creek and the 16th Street Viaduct will provide both the action and the architecture to satisfy my thoughts for an urban switching layout.

The space is not huge but I think it will be quite satisfying to both build and operate.

The room, a former spare bedroom converted to the library.

Layout on the north wall with the staging against the west wall.

A more detailed look at the layout.

LA Warehouse or LoDo - Sanborn Maps

I printed off and carefully cut and pasted together a map of the area that I'm considering could be the location for D&RGW or for that matter it could be the C&S (I'll have to check and see when the  Burlington Northern acquired the C&S) I haven't really read the maps closely enough to see what tracks, in 1903, belong to which railroad. But for now its something to look at and contemplate.

As you can see most of the action is on Wewatta Street on the west side and not as much on Wynkoop. Unfortunately the more interesting buildings are on Wynkoop while the more interesting trackage is on Wewatta. Ultimately with not wanting to disturb the track plan to much it doesn't really matter, it would be more about giving it the feel of LoDo and not something accurate.

Here is the general area that makes up LoDo. The right side is to the NE (Denver has not aligned directly north/south by any means). Off to the right of Wewatta is Union station and its yards. Wewatta Street serves as one of the primary access points to Union Station. I have oriented the map in reverse of how I described it in the last post. From the layout standpoint you would essentially be standing on Wewatta street with the 16th Street Viaduct to the left and the 14th Street Viaduct to the right and Wynkoop would be in the back.

Just a closer look at the potential modeling area. Lots of compression would need to take place.

LA Warehouse District - Or?

As I mentioned before I have been toying with the concept of moving the "location" of the layout from LA to Denver. I spent some time over the weekend doing a little research and downloading Sanborn Insurance Maps from the Library of Congress. These maps are from 1903 so they aren't going to have some of the information that I would need to model the 1960 - 1970 period, for that I will need to go to the Denver Public Library, but my library card has lapsed so that will have to wait for a bit. A little poking around shows that DPL likely has digital Sanborn maps up through 1929 with notes attached with changes from 1951 and may have non-digital maps from the 60s and up through 1974 according to the card catalog. So I need to work in a day at the library at some point.

Moving the location to Denver means that I can legitimately drop trying to shoehorn in the curved brick canyon scene that I like from LA that scene just does not exist in Denver. I have already added an extra foot to the length of the layout to accommodate it and I think I will keep that extra length for now. I don't need to change the track plan itself, so that's a good thing although there is another tweak that I'm contemplating that would require another redraw to make sure it aligns.

"Moving" to Denver means easier access to research materials and immediate access to the area of lower downtown (LoDo). Granted much has changed since the railroads worked that area but there is enough left to be able to replicate some of the major buildings. The viaducts that carried 16th and 15th street over the tracks would still be in place and would serve as very natural dividers for scenes on what would now be the north and south ends of the layout. Cherry creek and the 14th Street Viaduct would form the southern boundary, with 16th street being the northern boundary.

The two major streets north south streets would be Wynkoop and Wewatta. Tracks ran right down the streets in this area of Denver sharing the streets with regular traffic. All of the tracks in the area seem to have gone in by 1903. The railroads that owned those tracks is likely to have changed over the years as mergers and other fun things took place in LoDo and what I need to determine is when those tracks where actually pulled up as the rail traffic in the area dropped off. 

The big changes would be the change from AT&SF to D&RGW. So new motive power and probably a slight shift in the freight car fleet. Currently that is heavily biased towards Santa Fe but that is easy to change and it certainly doesn't eliminate the use of the Santa Fe fleet. The other potential change would be adding back in the 40' cars depending on what the time frame really ends up being and reducing the number of 50' cars. Just thoughts to mull on at this point.