The Critchell & Southern

As a modeler, I am interested mainly in narrow gauge steam railroads, especially the Colorado & Southern. I have for years been building models depicting the 'Colorado Road', and have been operating them under the guise of the freelanced "Critchell & Southern Railroad". In my paradigm, set in the late 1920's, the prospecters who inhabited the settlement of Critchell, a mining area about 35 miles SW of Denver, found a large vein of Yttrium, a substance used to harden steel. Tensions overseas and an expanding industrial economy made steel a lucrative commodity at that time, and it justified the building of a railway from the Colorado and Southern's South Park line at Waterton up Deer Creek Canyon to the mining camps around Critchell. The "High Grade Road", as it became known for both the ore it moved and the steep hills it climbed, was a quantum mirror of the operation at Climax, and bought or leased considerable amounts of equipment from the Colorado & Southern, thus giving it a very similar look and feel.

I have built two operating modules depicting C&S scenes, which I operate with the 20's & 30's Modular Model Railroad, an HO scale club that builds and publicly operates a modular model railroad layout here in Los Angeles. The first featured an HOn30 gauge branch based roughly on the Gilpin Tram / C&S operations around Central City, Colorado, and a second one depicting Louviers, Colorado as it appeared in the 1920's when it was a sleepy little whistle stop on the C&S.

Basing my models loosely around an existing prototype gives me a focus and purpose to my efforts. I have taken numerous research trips to places along the old C&S route, and since I grew up the the mining town of Critchell, I've been able to make my freelance model feel like a real railroad. This research also gets me away from my workbench and terminal, places I spend way too much time at... Just recently, my son and I made our way through the Pike National Forest on a 4x4, and where the trails ended made camp. we then backpacked down about 1000' in elevation into Platte Canyon, to the abandonded mining camp of Crosson, and explored the remains of the C&S grade that still clings to the side of the Gorge.