The UPPCR How it came about

Hi and to quote The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy this is the Why, What and Where phase

Why? does a die hard fan of British railways model trains thousands of miles away? well like a lot of UK based modellers of North American railways I got frustrated with the quality and price of UK models and whilst sitting waiting for our flight back to the UK a colleague passed a copy of MR magazine to me and by the time we landed at Brize Norton 36 hours later I had decided to sell up and switch to US modelling. I sold everything to other club members and funded my First HO US layout, a Burlington Northern switching layout, at that time I only had Athearn locos which were a great improvement over my Lima and Hornby.

A few Proto 2000 were added later then I got married and moved to a small 2 bedroom apartment with no room for my beloved HO stuff. So another switch this time to N scale loomed, withing a few weeks the HO had gone and I was introduced to the wonderful world of Atlas (still made by Kato) and Kato. This lasted a few years and another change was made this time I switched to modelling Swiss N scale.

 In 2006 I retired and set up home where I now live, after spending the last 20 years moved from pillar to post I now had a permanent base so a purpose built building was built to house my layout. During the course of retiring and moving we had a big clear out and one of the things to go were my trains, we needed the money and the cost of finishing my Swiss layout was over £1000 for the catenary alone. I had the building but no triains, a clean canvas to work from so after a few months work started on my next project, I had heard so many good things about modern British Models so I decided to go back to my first love BR in the late 50's. Sadly I felt the models were still no where near what I expected and wanted. So again for the last time I made a change back to North American modelling after sitting at an airport in the US (Raleigh Durham) on one of our many trips back home  and seeing MR again on the news stand.

What? Again the flight back to the UK allowed me to think, I knew I was going to sell all my UK stuff to fund this project. So I spent most of last September and early October doing research on the net and ordering back issues of MR etc etc. I came across some great modells and great layouts, but The Rochelle Sub and the UP Elmwood Sub layouts on the web influenced me to model the UP. After seeing the bright yellow locos with huge US flags on the side just kept reminding me of the US, those that have ventured across the Atlantic or Pacific for that matter won't fail to notice that the US flag is flown everywhere and having spent so much time there it does bring back great memories. Another influence was Pelle Soeborg and Carsten Lundsten, along with the other 2 layouts they helped convince me to model the post 2000 scene. The modern scene is from a distance like ours easy to model due to the amount of information and forums on modern railroads on the WWW, the drawback is new stock isn't released in model form straight away.

Where? This is what took the longest to decide. I knew what I wanted to build and that was MR project layout from 1982 the Washita and Santa Fe but then Qmodeller made himself known to me along with Tinhare who opened my eyes to ops. So it was back to the drawing board and 3 or 4 ideas were thrown around most of which were based around West Texas and Southern Oklahoma. These 2 areas had the traffic I wanted but something just wasn't quite right. Next I threw in the plan of the Montana Rail Link that appeared in MR a while back and this struck a chord, the only problem was the UP has very little interest in MT. It had everything and again I found some excuse why not to model it (too many turnouts). So I was back to an earlier plan and modifying this and that I had fancied California as a setting but 2 types of traffic I wanted aren't that common in that part of the world, a similar result was found with Salt Lake City UT ,well this went on until about January, when Mark said to me "you aren't going to build this overnight are you?" so out came the MRL plan again and I decided yep this is it, the yard is well a yard and as I am not reproducing a particular place what the heck. The MRL plan had what I wanted and in a space less than that available to me. So we decided to built the same layout in with 40% more space available and to top it off multideck it. By this time I was ordering videos from Joe Fugate and you know what I thought why not model the UP around Oregan. Oregan has all the types of traffic I want to see plus the paper and wood industry.

 So that's it a bit long winded but that's how I got to where I am today