Railroad Story

The Springfield, Omaha & Denver (also known more simply as the SO&D or the “Sod Line”) as a concept has existed since I was about 12 years old. In Great Model Railroads 2007, Bill Darnaby detailed the operation of a wayfreight over his timetable and train order railroad in an article called A Day on Number 20. I was instantly hooked on both the concept of TT&TO operation and this incredibly intriguing prototype – how had I never heard of this road before? When I found out that the Maumee was a work of incredibly plausible fiction, I knew then and there I was going to be a freelancer.

At about the same time, I read a book by Harry Bedwell called The Boomer. This book (still in print and highly recommended) is a compilation of short stories Bedwell wrote for Railroad Magazine in the 1930s and 40s, steeped in steam and the language of timetable and train order railroading. One of the roads from these stories was the Springfield, Omaha & Denver – a large Midwestern granger road stretching from Illinois to the Rocky Mountains. I wore the pages out of the Sod Line stories in that book, and while I played with various other freelance concepts over the years, when it came time to get serious about what I was modeling there was only ever going to be one choice.

Bedwell’s stories were undated, but clearly set in the early years of the 20th Century. My interests are a little further along in railroad history, so I worked to move the SO&D to the early 1950s. As it stands, the SO&D is a Class I granger road in the league of the CB&Q, Rock Island or Chicago & North Western. Lines radiate from Chicago to St Paul, Kansas City and, of course, Denver. Secondary lines connect places such as Milwaukee, St. Louis, Peoria and Springfield to the main trunk routes. While I acknowledge there was certainly not the traffic base for yet another Q-sized road in the Midwest in the 1950s, I felt I had to create a fairly large railroad to justify the things I liked best – large steam power, a wide variety of first generation diesels, a fleet of name trains and so on. Like the other big grangers, the road handles lots of overhead traffic from various eastern and western connections. The Colorado-to-California connection is another fictional road from the pages of yet another novel, the Pacific Midland from James McCague’s Fiddle Hill. This transcontinental connection was especially important to justify the large fleet of California-Chicago name trains.

Speaking of those name trains – in another story, Bedwell describes a crack Super Chief-style streamliner, the Silver Arrow. That was (and still is) about the most evocative name for a passenger train I’d ever heard of, and it gave rise to a whole fleet of SO&D trains a la the Hiawathas or the Zephyrs; thus, the SO&D became the Road of the Arrows.

The vision for the SO&D is to model one full freight crew district in 1951 as steam enters its last stand on the plains of southeastern Nebraska. Lots of staring at the system map and soul searching has led me to nail down a spot where a secondary main line leaves the Denver-Omaha-Chicago route and heads southwest for Kansas City and St. Louis.

A lot of legwork (and about 37 different locomotive paint schemes) has gone into the overall concept of the road in the last five years. I’m an historian by training and I’m not satisfied unless the road feels plausible. It’s been a lot of hard work and analysis paralysis, but also a heck of a lot of fun. At the moment, limited space has resulted in my modeling the terminus of a Nebraska branch line as an excuse to finally get myself off the spreadsheet planning stage and back to the workbench, but I still find myself working on big steam and lightweight cars for the day “The Big Layout” comes around. 

When I’m not working on all things SO&D, I can usually be found in a Middle School history classroom. I am also fortunate enough to spend many weekends operating the various railroads in the RiverRail group in Western Wisconsin – of all of these great people, I must offer a special thanks to Ron Copher of the Lake Erie and Southern for being a mentor in model railroading. My railroading interests also extend all the way up to 1:1 scale – I’m a fireman and student engineer at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois, which might explain the desire for all of the steam engines on the layout!

Locomotive Roster

Developing the roster for a big transition era Class I was a much bigger job than I ever expected it would be when I started out, but at the same time looking back there's no way I would have been happy had I tried to model a smaller road. The current roster has gone through several iterations, but has developed into something I believe is fairly plausible and representative of the decisions that real roads of the SO&D's class would (and did!) have to make in real-world history.

The premise of a road roughly the size of the Q, Rock Island or C&NW set a baseline for how many locomotives the SO&D would need of various types. Rather than pick a number from any one of these roads, I averaged – for example, averaging the total number of 2-8-2s on these three roads gave me a ballpark number of 250, so I allocated roughly that number of Mikes to the SO&D roster. I took a similar approach with freight cab units, winding up with approximately 110 units on the roster by 1951. The goal for the roster is to have large numbers of each of a few distinct locomotive types to give the impression of a larger fleet of engines – each Mikado, Mountain or ABA set of F units should be just another nameless locomotive.

The quest for a “signature locomotive” was one of the most difficult parts of the whole process. I wanted a “big steam” engine, but not one that would immediately scream its model prototype. At one point I’d collected six models of the Timken Four Aces as an attempt at an Early 30s ALCO Northern, but the fact that that engine sits shorter than a USRA Mike in height broke the plausibility mold! I wound up settling on a 4-8-2 in the form of Overland Models Frisco 4400s. Like their prototypes, in the SO&D fiction these locomotives are depression-era rebuilds of heavy 2-10-2s a la the Illinois Central or the Frisco itself. These engines have the virtues of being both fairly unknown and fairly generic looking, and it hasn’t proved too difficult to change their identities with larger tenders, mars lights and other small detail changes. I’ve acquired five thus far, representing 10% of a theoretical roster of 50 machines. I’m still hunting for more!

Planning the dieselization of a fictional railroad was also a task in and of itself. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of “I’ll have one of everything I like, it’s my railroad” but I am passionate about the image of the SO&D as a real railroad rather than a collection of toy trains. Again to that end, I looked to the prototype, attempting to strike a balance between the dieselization timelines and decisions of various midwestern roads. The Grangers were for the most part large enough that dieselization took a while, with a combination of steam, cab units and Geeps operating together that smaller roads or later converts to diesel never saw. This was yet another realization that validated my choice to model a larger Class I system!

I'd like to think I’ve struck a decent balance, with large numbers of diesel locomotives monopolizing trains on the main trunk routes (especially passenger!) with steam hanging on in certain areas (such as the one I model!) for the last couple years. Annual wheat rushes and the Police Action in Korea are keeping steam alive on the SO&D for at least the next few years just as it did on the Burlington – the active roster consists mainly of the 3300 series 4-8-2s, which as a class are still intact. Dwindling numbers of Mikados serve as the secondary players in the freight pool, with a few ancient 2-6-2s, 2-8-0s and Russian Decapods (I fire one in real life, so I had to!) hanging around in branch line service. Passenger service is in theory fully dieselized, but "MAIN" troop trains and second sections keep several Hudsons and Pacifics active this late in the game. The last fires will most likely be dropped in 1954, falling nicely between Rock Island’s 1952 and C&NW’s 1956.

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