Ochre

Ochre is loosely modeled on the Colorado narrow gauge railroads in the San Juans: The Denver & Rio Grande and the Rio Grande Southern. Both models here are styrene kits. The water tank is the ubiquitous Atlas kit; I have another of these at New Haven Yard. The depot is the Rico Depot kit which I think may still be in production. Nevertheless, I bought mine on the internet.

The original Rico depot no longer exists, but pictures of it are not exactly as the model portrays it, i.e. the cupola is not shown in original photographs, but I believe some of the other stations along the RGS did have such a cupola so some artistic license was probably used in the design of the kit and the overall appearance is genuine.

The depot below is at Silverton on the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge tourist railroad. This was originally the D&RG Silverton Branch. The construction and paint schemes of the D&RG and RGS were very similar. My scheme is a little different but authentic, I think.

There is still a water tank at Rico, but it looks nothing like this one. The one below is on the D&SNG. You will notice that the supports are a lot shorter than the Atlas model. This is typical of the narrow gauge tanks in Colorado. There is another tank just north of Durango and one on the RGS at Trout Lake which we drove by once but didn't stop at. There are a couple of companies that produce wood laser-cut kits that are more authentic for narrow gauge roads than the Atlas kit, but are a lot more expensive.

The stock pens are also at Ochre. I had a whole mess of stock cars and Stan had given me some cows, so I had to build some loading pens. Campbell makes a wood kit, but I am cheap and I figured "How tough can it be?". Anyway, I found a web site at the University of North Dakota that has a large collection of drawings for various types of farm structures and they have stock pens and loading ramps, so I used these to design mine. I made some jigs as I had for the cars. My generic fence jig can make fences to any length in 30-foot increments, but I only have room for what you see here. You may notice the first picture has no gate; I added this after I started wondering how the cows got in there. You gotta pay attention to details. The gate does work by the way; I keep it closed so the cows don't get out.

The loading chutes below are at the Cimmaron Visitor Center in the Curecanti National Recreation area. Cimmaron was where the D&RG railroad came out of the Gunnison River canyon because they decided it was too difficult to build the road through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The original roadbed east of here is now under water because of hydroelectric dams. The visitor center has a neat little museum and outdoor display of the railroad, including the stock pens, stock cars, and the engine on the first page of this site down by the river. It is well worth stopping if you are in the Black Canyon area.