C&N Railroad Project - Stopped in my tracks

As I started to sit down and contemplate what that final track plan for the Colorado and Northwestern would be I sat down with my copy of the January 1974 Railroad Modeler and read the John Olsen article again. I wanted to be sure I capture the feel of Sunset and not mash a whole lot of extras into it. Olsen's layout is pretty wide open but that is what HOn3 will allow you to do. Moving up in scale changes the outlook a bit, plus at this juncture I'm working in a very defined space. But do I need to work in such a defined space. Certainly there are limits that I have to adhere to but perhaps I need to look outside the box a bit.

I flipped through the photos that I have downloaded, a number of which I want to get prints of. And really took a closer look at Sunset. Curved trestles, check. Wye with station in the middle, check. Small town, maybe in a slightly different location, check. What's missing from this list? Well the water tank itself, but that lies on the other side of four mile creek, maybe its in maybe its out. What about mining? Sunset is the junction point but its also a small mining town as well, certainly not on the scale of Eldora and Ward, but there is certainly mining occurring and some of its rail served. You can just make out in this picture that there is a large building to the right of the curved trestle in the background (that's the Eldora branch). This building looks like many of the mine buildings in the area so I'm fairly certain it is, indeed, a mine (research to follow).

So that means I need at least one mine in the area and maybe two. Its not uncommon to have mines right in the middle of a Colorado town (Central City for one) but I would rather have it off farther along the Eldora branch. A mine takes room though, more room than maybe I have available. So I'm going to go back the doodling stage and see what I can do to include some mining. I may explore making a module that exceeds some of my initial parameters. We shall see.

The alleged mine is the building in the back to the right of the Eldora trestle.

You can actually make it out in this earlier photo as well. The grade to Eldora is started but there is no rail to it yet. Probably means that it wasn't actually rail served but I can do what I like on the model.