Home of the St. Louis, Leadville, & Rosetta Railroad, my model railroad layout project.
Updated August 30th, 2025
The Saint Louis, Leadville, & Rosetta Railroad is my fictional freelance model railroad. Its alt-history begins with its inception in 1870, when it was incorporated to move freight inland from the fictional Mississippi River city of Rosetta, MO and from the lead mines to the smelters in the fictional Leadville, MO, and up to Saint Louis. It interchanged with the Missouri Pacific out of Fredericktown, MO, and eventually would connect with the Frisco in Ste. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau.
The line was expanded in the late 1880s, saw its heyday from the recovery of the Panic of 1893 to the Stock Crash in 1929, and surivived the Great Depression. Nearly succumbing to the strain, the Rosetta Railroad lasted just long enough to become vital to the war effort, as the US Military demanded the products of Missouri's Lead Belt. The railroad came out of receivership in 1948, in time to be purchased by the Missouri Pacific to extract the last of the aging lead mines. The Rosetta Railroad continued to run its own corporate structure until 1949, and was shortly dieselized after being completely folded into the Missouri Pacific.
The former Rosetta Railroad spent twenty years as a branchline system, falling into disrepair, until its main line was abandoned after exactly 100 years in 1970. The line was partially revived in 1998 as a tourist railroad, and continues operations today, sometimes in cooperation with the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, & Southern tourist railroad.
I'm freelancing not only the railroad, but also the county, and many of the cities and towns, otherwise I'd drive myself insane with trying to get everything perfectly accurate down to the last cobblestone on a back street. As it is, I already will be visiting several towns along the fictional route to better understand the architecture of the buildings at the time of the Great Depression.
