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.

Sanborn Insurance Maps

Key for interpreting Sanborn fire insurance maps

I ran across some exciting information from the Library of Congress regarding Sanborn Insurance maps. These are a wonderful resource for model railroaders and indeed any interesting in seeing how their town developed over time. The library is indicating that they will have approximately 500,000 maps online by 2020. More maps will be added each month.

Library of Congress Announcement 

They currently have about 12,000 maps online from the original incarnation of this project which stalled over a disagreement with the company that now owns the Sanborn maps over what constituted public domain. Since they will be uploading maps into the 1960s it sounds like some kind of agreement can be reached. Many state and local libraries have copies or even originals of these maps in their map rooms and even available online although availability can be very limited. For instance the University of Colorado has many Colorado maps available online to anyone that can navigate their site (which quite frankly is awful). Whereas the City of Los Angeles Library (not the LA County library) will only let you view them in person without a library card. Online access requires a library card. The University of Berkeley apparently has a complete collection of Sanborn maps for California but it only seems to be available to faculty and students online.

One thing to keep in mind is there is not a map for every town in the US. For instance I couldn't find maps for Ward or Eldora in Boulder County, they were just not worth the effort by Sanborn to map out. But you can find interesting places like Deadwood SD!

Here is a link to the map section of the Library of Congress:

Library of Congress Map Section

Its definitely worth perusing, there is a lot of fascinating sections that can be used by both railroaders and wargamers.

Here is the direct link to the Sanborn collection as it exists today. Hopefully we will see the number of documents start to scroll up

Library of Congress Sanborn Insurance Maps

Calamity and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

As with most of my projects I like to do research. Now Calamity is completely a figment of my imagination but I would like to have it at least fall into the realm of possibility. I have always envisioned it as a mountain town in the old west, so narrower streets, a nice slope to that there could be visible building foundations, in other words a lot of things to keep someone's interest while they are waiting their turn in the game. When I stumbled across some RPG maps for Deadwood, South Dakota I decided I would like to see how the real Deadwood was laid out. I found out that the South Dakota state library had the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for 1885 and 1891. Close enough to fall into my time frame. But the maps were not available online, although they had been scanned. Getting access to Sanborn maps can be really frustrating most states restrict access, even online access, to state residents (by the way if someone in LA can go to the LA city not county library and download the maps for Bodie, CA I would appreciate it). Colorado seems to be the exception and anybody can access the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for Colorado online and download the images.

I happen to have an old friend living in South Dakota and he applied for his state library card and was able to download the 9 maps for Deadwood that I wanted. Thanks Larry! Anyway the information on these maps is very interesting, if you can get your hands on the colored versions (again thanks University of Colorado) then you can pick things out by the color which represents the major material that the building was made from. They are also drawn to scale so you can take rough building measurements from them if you need to. Not every town has a set of Sanborn maps but when they do you can literally follow the growth of a town from one edition to the next. While 1885 can be done in 3 maps, 1891 Deadwood takes 6 maps. Deadwood is an interesting place to be sure and I look forward to really digging into these maps while I work on more model buildings for Calamity.

Here I pieced together the three sections that make up the 1885 edition of Deadwood, You can see the roads, the railroad tracks, rivers, creeks and buildings.

Moving in on one of the sections. In this case map 1 includes both the scale detail but the outline of the town and how the map sections relate to the area that makes up Deadwood. Not every area is detailed on the maps. They are primarily concerned with more built up areas.

Moving in a little closer in this case where two map sections come together,

And some close up detail

This is a colored version in this case of Silver Plume Colorado which has had its fair share of influence on what I want Calamity to look like.