Home of the St. Louis, Leadville, & Rosetta Railroad, my model railroad layout project.
The Saint Louis, Leadville, & Rosetta Railroad is my fictional freelance model railroad. Its alt-history begins with its inception in 1866, 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 Iron Mountain Railway (later 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 officially abandoned in 1957, 90 years after it opened. The line was partially revived in 1997 as a tourist railroad, and continues operations today.
I'm freelancing not only the railroad, but also the county, and several 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.
An early design for Rosetta, I abandoned this as the resin printer filled the space intended for the city. Rosetta deserves a bit more space to be modeled, anyways, and my skills in track planning have grown, but I still like this plan and some elements will be recycled into the future Rosetta section.
Originally, I'd designed this as an unrelated layout, but realized it would make an excellent Leadville. Trains go up the grade from the mainline junction in Leadville, around the horseshoe curve, and stop for water at the old ore crusher in Chalmers. Continuing on, the trains cross a cliff escarpment over a waterfall, then roll into Mine No. 1, where the train is watered, turned, and run around, ready to come back down the mountain.
The Leadville branch was built in 1899 to Mine No. 3, and extended in 1915 to the existing Mine No. 4. Naturally, it shouldn't have survived the drying up of Mine No. 4 in the late 1940s, but the postwar drop in scrap and commodity prices resulted in the tracks sitting and rusting, forgotten by all but the townsfolk of Leadville. The last train left Mine No. 4 in 1947, carrying a load of equipment sold to Doe Run Corporation. Railfans managed to capture footage of this event.
The turntable up at the mine is a rare survivor, too. Most small turntables fell derelict and were removed and filled in, but the Chalmers Mine turntable proved useful for turning the small locomotives needed to navigate the sharp curves up to the mine. In the modern day, passenger excursions run up to Leadville to see the historic mine site and mill, lovingly restored by the Chalmers Mine Historic Foundation. The turntable is operated on steam days, while the diesels tend to run around the trains.
Here's my benchwork plan for the Leadville branchline. It'll be all plywood box framing, 2"x2" dimensional structure, and pink foam for the scenic base. Homasote will sit underneath the trackbed to support the hand laid rails.
