CASPER
THE PROTOTYPE
For years, Casper and Cheyenne vied for the "largest town in Wyoming" distinction, both hovering roughly around 40,000. That's not a typo - that's forty thousand. And these places were (and still are) the largest towns BY FAR!
 In
this 1940s photo (you can tell by the cars), the rail line is behind
us, running parallel to Second Street. Center Street in this photo
is the one that runs slightly diagonally to the lower right corner
of the photo. The building on the corner in at the left is the
Rialto movie house. I saw all sorts of summer kid movies there in
the mid-to-late 1960s. |
|
|
 This
is the Midwest Oil Refinery, a few miles north of Casper. The photo
was taken sometime before about 1945. I don't know which railroad
served the refinery, but obviously one did. |
 This
is a great aerial view looking south from above Center Street. The
timeframe is sometime around 1940. Just about to cross over Center
St. is a CB&Q switcher with a cut of cars. |
 This
somewhat washed out photo is a 1925 shot of one of Casper's
refineries. I believe it's the Standard Refinery west of town. |
By 2003, some of the tracks in east Casper and Evansville had been removed - access tracks to the old refineries (even the Little America refinery, which was still in place when I was through in 2000, is not active any more - at least not for Little America) are gone, and where there were three or so tracks crossing the road between Evansville and Casper, now there is only one.
My mother lived near the tracks in Evansville for years. I remember sitting in her home visiting just a few years ago, and hearing three or four trains a day go by. More went by at night. In our 2003 trip to Wyoming, I don't recall any trains going by at all. I asked her about the trains - she said that there is one, sometimes two, that go past at night, and occasionally one during the daytime.
THE MODEL RAILROAD
The track arrangement on the layout is:
I've
rotated this drawing 90 degrees counter-clockwise from its orientation on
the overall plans, to make it fit on the page better. In the main plans,
it's the top-most section.
The Mainline from Glenrock comes in nearest the aisle, then progresses alongside the yard; after turning back on itself (skirting the roundhouse), the mainline leads to Powder River along the wall, at the left side of this diagram. Keep in mind - the mainline is yellow.
To the left of the roundhouse, which represents the West end of Casper, is an industrial area holding a few local industries. The Standard Oil refinery's loading rack and some small part of the refinery is above that. Standard's refinery used to operate on that end of town. The Standard refinery was shut down several years ago. There was another refinery, Conoco, I think, on the east end of town, but this one has been omitted from the layout (you can't reproduce everything, and with a second, almost fully modeled refinery at Cody, I decided a third large refinery, even if only loading racks, would be one too many. Sorry, Conoco!).
Near the top left of the diagram is the large refer icing facility that was located in Casper. The icing tracks will hold ten or eleven cars each, for a total of about twenty.
The other industries in Casper are under development, and as research progresses I'll flesh out more details.
The classification tracks, if completely full, will hold around one hundred cars (give or take a few). I'm gonna need an awful lot of cars on this layout! Those tracks will never be full, of course - a clogged yard can't do its job.
The wreck train track will also be used to store other MOW equipment such as a snowplow, and may also serve to store the odd passenger car, though there will never be more than one or two of those in the yard at a time (despite being the sometimes largest city in Wyoming, Casper was always just a stop on the line, and not a major passenger terminus).
Casper is on the lower level.