First of all, I'd like to introduce the man behind the idea. My name is Alan and I've been a rail enthusiast for all of my twenty-one years. My favorite railroad being the Southern Pacific, my model railroad represents a fictional division of the real system.
Nothing has actually been built, but I am working on the background of the division and all associated operating aids. A timetable is in the works, a general operating scheme is in mind, and I'm steadily getting to the point when I will have nothing left to add before construction begins.
The Seattle Division is the product of two false starts. I had developed an extensive railroad on paper over the course of two years before abandoning it out of concerns that it might not be realistic enough for my taste. The PWE System had a perfectly free-lanced route map, heavy traffic, and one connection to the real world south of Eugene, Oregon. However, this region would never have seen the kind of economic development that would have made the railroad viable, so I scrapped the whole thing. It was a hard decision, as I had made timetables, train schedules, paint schemes for the locomotives, and all sorts of other things relating to the railroad. I still have some of the relics.
My next attempt was a more prototype-based system in northern Washington, called the North Coast Railroad. The road was made up of old Northern Pacific and Milwaukee Road branchlines, headquartered in Seattle with lines into the Cascade foothills. The main traffic would have been coal and forest products, along with a Boeing airplane plant in Renton that would have received fuselages by rail. The railroad also had a connection at Sumas into Canada for access to Roberts Bank to export coal. I don't remember exactly why I killed off this idea, but it could have been the system map, which does not lend itself well to an operator-friendly layout. The North Coast still lives in my head as the subject of a novel.
My problem is that not only do I like too many prototype railroads, I have a hard time committing to something. I didn't want to model anything strictly prototypical, but I did decide I wanted to model the Southern Pacific. I had toyed with the idea of a Seattle Line for years, but my problem had always been its alignment. The line would have run north through Longview, then followed the Cowlitz River up to Morton and a connection with the old MILW. The new idea was to run the line north out of Toledo instead of east, to connect with MILW at Chehalis. This new mainline would have been more of a competitive route against the roughly parallel Burlington Northern main, and also more direct than the Morton alignment.
The Seattle Division is the result of SP buying a lot of remaining MILW track in Washington after the railroad left the area in 1980. While SP did not purchase the entire mainline across the state to Spokane or Montana, it did buy the portion to Cedar Falls for timber traffic, as well as the Frederickson-Morton branch, the Chehalis-Raymond branch, and the Centralia-Grays Harbor line. A lot of route consolidation has taken place and SP only continues to operate the Grays Harbor and Morton lines in 1994, the year that I model.
Traffic on the line consists of a pretty even split between through freight and local switchers, and the through freights are almost evenly split between general merchandise and intermodal. Weyerhaeuser also operates log trains on trackage rights between Chehalis and Tacoma, and steam locomotive 4449 makes occasional appearances.
Follow along and I'll keep posting information about this new railroad concept.
