While reading Gregg Condon's book on The Dinky, a three-foot gauge railroad bought by Chicago and North Western just after the turn of the century which ran between the towns of Fennimore, WI, and Woodman, WI, I was inspired to model it. Now, I don't plan on modeling it 100%. First reason is I would like to do it in On30. Second is that with only two other stops along the route without including the two terminal towns, operations is almost non-existent. I plan on adding a siding at Woodman that prototypically was served by Standard Gauge. But the single siding would not only eliminate the two different-gauged tracks from crossing, but would give two extra industries to the Dinky's sparse list, and one very key one - A Lumber Yard. One of the stops on the Dinky's line was 'Anderson's Mill.' It was only a small siding with a platform and a sign for a station, and the only action you would see would be the occasional flatcar spotted on the siding for railroad ties from the mill. But, with the addition of a lumber yard in Woodman, it would give a realistic path for some of the lumber being cut at Anderson's Mill to go. Also, at Fennimore, there was a good ammount of 3 and 4-Rail track. As I don't lay my own track, I would like to eliminate as much of that as possible. That's not hard to do at all, in fact, and so I simply regarded all 3 or 4-rail track as narrow gauge. Questions: I have a few questions about the line that someone may know about. 1. The Dinky had about 20 cars on the line. The majority were box cars, but there were also stock cars and flats. But the only place to store any rolling stock when not in use would have to be two small spurs at Fennimore, as all other tracks on the route are runarounds. That being said, Anderson's Mill and the Werley runarounds don't need to be used, so cars would have been kept there as well, but that eliminates the option of running more than one train on the 16-mile line. 2. The line had no more than two engines in service at any time on the railroad. Oddly enough, the line has a total of four engine stalls. There was a three-stall engine house at Fennimore, and a one-stall engine house, with what appears to be an attached workshop at Woodman. But with the line's active engine in the center stall of the Fennimore engine house, the turntable had to rotate a bit to reach the Woodman Engine Shed, and the fact that both locomotives on the line were 45-foot 2-6-0's and and the turntables were only 50 feet long begs the question: What were the other stalls used for? Perhaps just left empty? If they were used to store any rolling stock, it would have had to be pushed in by hand or some other method, as a car and engine would not fit on the turntable.
Perhaps they were built with great expectations of being needed in the future. Some small operations were known to use empty stalls for car repairs.
Perhaps this site would have someone that could answer the questions you have. At least it's a start- perhaps the Wisconsin chapters of the National Railway Historical Society may be of assistance as well. Your proposed layout sounds quite interesting..........
Well, the obvious assumption would be the expectation of expanding, but already by 1905, the Dinky was lost in a sea of Standard Gauge. Both Fennimore and Woodman were served by standard gauge railroads, limiting the amount of freight traffic to those not big enough to fit in a boxcar and being transferred from the C&NW in Fennimore to the Milwaukee Road, which went through Woodman. Heck, the only reason the 16-mile stretch was kept narrow gauge is the engineers employed two horseshoe curves on the line - one with a radius of only 250 feet. This meant only the smallest of engines could run on the line. In 1910, the C&NW attempted to use a 2-8-0 on the line, but it tended to derail and break track. The Dinky, therefor, was limited to mostly a passenger service. Because both engines were rarely, if ever used at the same time, there was always a favorite out of the two serving the line. Luckily for me, Bachmann happens to offer 4-4-0's based of of 3-foot gauge Baldwins, one of the early locomotives serving the Dinky, and 2-6-0 Moguls, the two later locomotives. I plan on modeling the line with a series of modules. Each town will have it's own module, and scenic modules will branch from that. And there will be at least one corner module in order to model the famous 'Horseshoe-Curve.'
Well, what I suggested is still plausible. There would be little other reason to construct that much space. Also, the era of railroad expansion was still ongoing. It was not really fairly well ended until the USRA years. And even thereafter some companies, large and small, stubbornly still had big ideas... But a series of financial recessions in the 1920's... And as I noted previously, that space might even have been planned for other shop use.
Having just read the book, visited the museum in Fennimore, and curious/interested in modeling such a line (but without space), have you built the layout and if so could you post a few pics?
