GLENROCK

THE PROTOTYPE

Glenrock is a little town that seems to hover somewhere between boom town and ghost town. I remember it vaguely as a neat little place when I was a small child (five or six). It's located roughly half way between Douglas and Casper - about twenty-five miles from either town. 

Here's one of the fractionating towers at the abandoned Glenrock refinery. The photo, and the ones that follow,  is from December, 1995.

These are some of the abandoned buildings along the Glenrock right-of-way, taken almost under an oil loading rack. The large brick building, partially collapsed, was some sort of power plant, judging by the adjacent smoke stack.

These tanks are, I believe, some of the petroleum refinery storage tanks. The photo is from December, 1995.

THE MODEL RAILROAD

The track arrangement on the layout is:

Pretty simple, huh? That's because the town of Glenrock is on the opposite side of the North Platte River from the CB&Q. The Burlington had only a passing siding called "Glenrock."

 One of the realism compromises I've made here is that trains pass through the Glenrock area the wrong way, based on where the town of Glenrock is on the layout. On the track plan at this point, North is up, and the town of Glenrock would be on the backdrop at the bottom of the plan (on the wall). But in real life, in this same orientation Casper is to the left and Douglas to the right, the reverse of the directions on the plan. Of course, I could say Glenrock is in the aisle and maybe move the North Platte between the Glenrock siding and the aisle, making North to the bottom, thus correcting the discrepancy. But on the other hand, I'd like to see Glenrock on the backdrop, and not just prairie.  Who knows? Something to mull over.

Glenrock's biggest claim to fame now, and probably the only reason it's still a viable community, is the Dave Johnston Power Plant a couple miles east of town. This is a coal burning plant, and coal trains arrive frequently to feed this hungry monster. In the mid-sixties, when I toured the power plant with the rest of my sixth-grade class, the plant was a fraction of its current size, with only the two smallest, and the next-to-smallest, units in the production (the third one, the slightly larger one, had just gone into operation at that time). In the layout timeframe the plant didn't exist at all yet, so it won't be found here.

So where are the model photos? Wanna see pictures of the basement floor?