Modeling the AT&SF - D&RGW Joint Line through Colorado Springs from Milepost 70 to Milepost 80 circa 1978-1979
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Post 7: Laying out the last major section of the layout: Kelker-Drennan
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It’s Summer, and work on the layout has slowed to a crawl, but I was on a roll this past Spring, maybe even a tear. I think it was because the final stage of the planning process, the full-size ground truth check, was nearing its end. I was itching to get back to work on benchwork now that I knew the final deck levels and lay of the land that I will be modeling and what will fit comfortably. Finally I will be able to press on with laying track at long last. But that will have to wait until Fall and the return of indoor activity time, so let’s wrap this up so I will be ready to get back down in the basement.
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My layout room is L-shaped (layout plan), with a longer south wall where Kelker-Drennan will be located. From the edge of the Transit Mix area to the end of the L is 17’ 9”. The left 2 feet of that is reserved for the wooded Shook’s Run ravine to create a scenic transition and view separation between scenes. The rest is dedicated to rendering as much of Kelker and the Drennan Industrial Park as I can fit without it looking at all crowded. That’s important, because this is the very south edge of Colorado Springs city limits and it is wide open space, or at least it was before it was fully developed as an extractive and industrial area. Basically it sits on a large deposit of exposed alluvial sand and gravel that has been washed down out of the mountains to the west over eons, and it is now filled with sand and aggregate yards, concrete batch plants, hot asphalt mixing plants, precast concrete plants, scrap yards, and the like.
USGS (modified)
(click on image to enlarge)
As you can see, Kelker and Drennan are actually two different places, not quite a mile apart, separated by aptly named Sand Creek. But being on opposite sides of the main they physically and operationally compliment each other quite nicely, so I’ve slid Drennan north to occupy the area on the east side of the mainline at the rear, since Kelker occupies only the west or front side.
Since 1974 Kelker is were the single-track portion of the Joint Line vacates Rio Grande rails and starts running on Santa Fe high-iron, so the milepost numbers jump from D&RGW 79 (from Denver Union Depot) to AT&SF 660 (from Atchison, KS). It’s also the site of not one, but two yards supporting interchange with the US Army’s Fort Carson railroad. One yard belonged to the Rio Grande, the other to the Santa Fe, ten tracks in all. Obviously that will have to be severely scaled back to fit. I’ve combined and reduced it to five much shorter tracks. This will be an active live interchange, as the Fort Carson switch job will come out of staging, cross the swing gate, then split off onto its own right of way to cross Las Vegas Street and enter the interchange yard at its south end.
D&RGW GP9 5942 heading into the north end of the interchange yard
Larry Green, 1978
USAX GP7L 1823 switching the south end of the interchange yard
Fort Carson is home station of the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division, and it received a variety of inbound carloads of supplies, munitions and new equipment in boxcars, new vehicles and armor on flat cars, and tank car loads of gasoline, diesel, and JP5 jet fuel for its compliment of vehicles and helicopters. I’ve even read that some of the World War II era wood-framed barracks were still in use into the mid ‘70s and still heated with coal stoves, so theoretically even loose car loads of coal were interchanged here. On top of that were battalion and brigade size equipment rail movements to different deployment stations and field exercises and return. Its a golden opportunity to combine my interests in modeling both railroad and military equipment that I just could not pass up.
USAX H12-44 1860 at Ft Carson switching the caboose for a rail movement of armor. Acquiring a fleet of Rapido DODX flats is going to be a necessary stretch.
Robert Harmen, 1977
In my late 1970s era there was no rail-served industry at Kelker, just the interchange yard, but later a rail-to-truck transfer facility with two large storage bins was established beside one of the AT&SF yard tracks. It handled lime for use in remediating acid leaching from the old gold mines, mills and tailing piles in the Cripple Creek mining district up in the mountains to the west. I’m going to backdate and downsize that operation, using one of the yard tracks as a team track for transloading lime from covered hoppers directly into pneumatic bulk semi-trailers using portable conveyors, as was done for a time on the team track in the downtown Santa Fe yard, so it’s not too big a stretch. Hot asphalt could also be transloaded here from heated and insulated tank cars into tanker trailers for delivery to the mixing plants, which were not directly served by rail.
Another customer I will add is a spur to the city’s waste water treatment facility, which is located at MP 77, three miles to the north and on the west side of Las Vegas Street. It doesn’t have rail service, but it is large enough to justify it, and at one time a spur did cut off the Rio Grande at the spot, known then as Leander, to drop down and cross Las Vegas to serve a small meat packing plant. I’ll serve this hypothetical traffic with a spur off the north end of the yard to spot tank cars of chlorine, acid and chemicals for unloading. Another example of an industry that does exist in the Springs, and so is a plausible what-if rail customer on the layout.
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Drennan Industrial Park
Across the main to the east (against the wall) is the relocated Drennan Industrial Park. It’s served by a long double-ended lead with two opposing switches at its midpoint. Those two leads into the industrial park really do cross each other on a diamond before branching and curving east to serve several customers. In my era the park was in its early stages of development and only the two front most industries existed, but I don’t have room to extend the tracks further back anyway.
Kelker-Drennan from the north end on the layout
Colorado Silica plant from west of the mainline
To the north of the diamond is Colorado Silica, a large sand extraction, washing, drying and grading facility specializing in filtration sand for municipal water plants and such. It was an active volume shipper loading both railroad and private-marked 2000-4000 cuft covered hoppers. The plant was wedged in between the main line and its loading spur, but I needed to mirror the complex array of conveyors, dryers, screen towers, storage bins and loaders to the east side of the spur for better appearance and more practical track access when operating on the layout.
Colorado Silica as it was, and as mirrored
Colorado Silica on the layout, with the chem spur in the foreground
To the south of the diamond is the large fenced yard and loading track of Western Scrap Metal Processing, which had relocated from its cramped yard in downtown Colorado Springs reached by C&S trackage. It is now a much larger operation capable of loading sorted, cut and graded scrap steel into 2-4 gondolas at a time for shipment to steel mills, including the Colorado Fuel and Iron mill down in Minnequa, outside Pueblo, Colorado. The yard is equipped with a metal shear/baler/logger, multiple scrap handling cranes, and piles of shredded steel poking up above the gondolas.
Western Scrap Metal Processing At center right of the yard is the shear/logger/baler
with a pivoting conveyor
Western Scrap Metal on the layout, with Kelker yard in the foreground.
The covered hoppers and tank cars are spotted on the transloading track,
with Springs Gas in the far corner
The last customer at the south end will be Springs Gas, an LPG dealer that was actually located five miles further south on the Santa Fe at Crews (MP 654 in Security-Widefield), where the Joint Line resumes its two-main-track character for the run to Pueblo. It’s yet another within-reach stretch of reality to relocate an actual active customer onto the layout.
LPG tank cars at Springs Gas, 1978
Kelker-Drennan from the south end on the layout
After exiting south from Kelker-Drennan the main line will be screened by scenery as it does a 180 to head across the swing gate and then enter the Pueblo South Staging yard.
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After laying out the track and industries in Kelker-Drennan the result is a spread-out switching district jointly served by the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande, sometimes at the same time, which will require planning, cooperation, and flexibility on the part of crews—and the dispatcher when use of the main line is required to run between Kelker yard and the switching leads. I think I have achieved my goals of balancing trackage, traffic sources, operations, and a sense of wide open space here, so I’m pretty satisfied.
I’m now ready to start building again, but I need to finish some non-railroad projects first, so I probably won’t be making any new blog posts until Fall.
See you next time.
