A little "model" history
While the B&CC is the second model railroad to undergo construction in my basement, as far as paper designs are counted, it is well into the twenties. My interest in Colorado narrow gauge railroading (and the Clear Creek district in particular) developed during the annual Colorado camping trips that my family took when I was young. On the docket was the pilgrimage to Georgetown to see the restoration efforts on the loop, followed by a visit to the western portal of the Moffat Tunnel and then up over Rollins Pass and making our way down to Black Hawk.
My first attempts to design a model layout focused on trying to build the loop, but after many attempts I never could get the selective compression right and looked at going a different direction, which culminated in the first generation basement road, a dual gauge (HO/HOn3) freelance road tentatively set in the 1880s and called the Goldville and Denver. There is nothing like the actual building of a layout to point out why the accumulated wisdom is what it is (i.e. have standards for grades, curve radii, etc.). Fortunately for the guilty, the photos of that layout will remain hidden from the light of day.
The initial genesis for the Blackhawk and Central City came during 2009 when I was scratch building the cars for the Goldville and Denver (I was chasing the Cars AP certificate at the time). It was time to order the decals and I realized that I just didn’t like the tentative name, nor did I like its reporting marks. After a week of kicking names around, I came back to the Clear Creek area with the Black Hawk and Central City, and to make the reporting marks work for me, I had to change the name from Black Hawk to Blackhawk. Remember that when it comes to the justification of a model railroad, the first rule (“it’s your railroad, do what you want”) always applies.
For the next step in the B&CC’s formation, we fast forward to June 2010. I returned from the MCoR regional to discover that the downspout that drains the front half of my roof was doing half of its job - water was getting down from the roof, but not away from that house. This led to water damage in the cabinet under the G&D’s yard and to the yard being pulled up and the cabinet removed before we went on vacation in early July. During the vacation, I decided to take up the G&D trackage and start over from square one.
My interests are researching early railroads (pre 1900), narrow gauge, prototypical operations, and scratch building. Putting these all interests together, I decided the following for my “givens” for the B&CC:
- It would be set in 1870 (before the prototype, the Colorado Central was built)
- While being a freelance road, it would adopt track construction standards based on those used by the historical railroads built in the area (the CCRR and the Gilpin Tramway)
- As much of the pike as possible would be scratch built –(track would be hand laid and spiked; cars, structures and motive power would also be scratch built)
- The layout would be small (less than 70 square feet). One thing I don’t enjoy is the maintenance work involved in having a large layout
- Finally, it would cover the eight miles of CCRR track built along the north fork of Clear Creek from Forks Creek to Central City as shown in the following highlighted CCRR map (Nevadaville is labeled as Nevada)
- The interworking with the Colorado Central would allow me to add Colorado Central cars to the layout as needed, but one aspect I wanted to capture was the feel of operations where there isn't enough rolling stock to carry offered traffic, so car counts on the layout would be kept to a minimum.
