Whistle Music Music Ancr: Tracks Ahead.

Brought to you by The Model Railroad Industry Association.

Helping hobbyists design and build their own miniature railroad empires, inside or outside, big or small (Whistle) Kato manufacturer of precision railroad models and the UniTrack System.

Music Hi, I'm Spencer Christian.

On this episode of Tracks Ahead we'll visit a detailed version of Union Pacific's Sherman Hill area.

We'll stop by a reclaimed logging railroad in the shadow of Washington's Mt.

Rainier and we'll talk to a man who's regarding by many as the best living railroad photographer.

But first, let's head south of the border for a luxurious ride through one of the true wonders of nature, Mexico's Copper Canyon.

Ancr: It is longer than the Grand Canyon, it is wider than the Grand Canyon, and it is deeper than the Grand Canyon, in fact you could fit almost four of them into the Copper Canyon.

The vistas here rival anything you find anywhere and unless you really want some serious exercise, the only way from end to end is by train.

Ron & Andrea Wood: It is spectacular and cliffs became like statues they were so rugged and all these little spirals jutting out of the formation, whether it's the water or whatever, it's as though you're looking at a whole lot of statues as you go along.

It's wonderful.

Ancr: It lies a couple hundred miles south of Tuscon, Arizona.

Trains Unlimited Tours runs charters through the rugged canyon several times each year.

This is December in the Copper Canyon or Barranca del Cobre .

This winter means flowers are in bloom and the canyon is coated with varying shades of green.

And since this is not the United States, all parts of the train are accessible.

Riding the nose of the train or on the side of the engine is a rare experience not to be missed.

From this vantage point you get to see the canyon as it unfolds before you while the sound of the powerful diesel is extreme.

What strikes you is the gentle scent of flowers on the wind not something you would ever experience cooped up in a passenger coach.

It is a trip of a lifetime but for some, once is not just enough.

For some the rail trip through the Copper Canyon is something personal and something to be revisited like a good friend.

Lee: I first made this trip in 1966 on a two-car, rail diesel car train.

For 34 years I waited to come back to see especially the Te Mares area.

Well I'm back.

Ancr: The Te Mares loop or El Lasso is a spectacle of engineering genius; for Lee Johnson it was something he had to see again.

The loop is a 180 turn inside solid rock, just part of a 406-mile route and includes 86 tunnels and 37 bridges.

Lee: The line starts out at about 49 feet above sea level at Los Moches and at one point it's 8,071 feet high.

This is done with no cog and no switchbacks it's all done by adhesions.

It's quite a climb.

Ancr: He found out about this trip in Popular Mechanics Magazine back in the 1960's.

The rail line begun in the early 1870's.

It took 90 years to complete.

Originally this line was meant to connect Topolo Bombo Bay in Sinaloa Mexico with Topeka, Kansas, shortening the existing route from Kansas City to San Francisco by more than 400 miles.

Today the line is used by locals to get through the canyon and it is a special destination for tourists.

But do not think that this trip is like heading out to places like Cancun or Cabo San Lucas.

It's rough and basic once you get off the train.

While there are some lovely hotels that cater to the tourist trade, Lee Johnson says you can't see many changes since he rode these rails in the 1960's.

It's incredible and these pictures do not truly do it justice.

Adjectives seem to fall short; it is a hard place to put into words.

Lee: You can't, it's something you've got to see.

It's wilderness, until you see the rock formation, the flowers that are blooming along the way, you really can't give a person an idea.

Film, camera film, video; will give you somewhat of an idea but I think until you experience the ride you really don't understand it.

Conductor: John Farley, Morgans, Newmarks, Charlotte, Schneider, Warren, Cobbler and the family on the first bus.

Ancr: There are stops along the way, the Mirador Hotel seemingly carved out of the canyon's rim.

The view at sunrise is not to be missed.

From this modern hotel you can see homes of the Tarahumara Indians.

They live simply in primitive conditions.

Years ago these natives had a chance to get electricity and fresh water run into their homes.

They turned it down in order to keep living the old way.

Terry Hanson : It's amazing their tenacity to live in that environment.

Ancr: All rail trips have a certain historic feel to them.

The sense that you're traveling in an older classic style.

Riding through the Copper Canyon there's a sensation that time has stopped that you're locked in a different age.

Andrea: When I think of this train trip, what attracted us to this holiday was it was going to be real Mexico rather than the tourist, the beaches, we're not beach people.

It was the thought that we're going to see a real part that hadn't been altered very much.

Ancr: Inside the cars food is served in a grand tradition of the railroads; fresh ingredients are cooked up by the chef below in the galley.

Outside through the domed windows the canyon and all it's wonders are your constant companion.

At many of the stops you'll find local crafts but none of the crowds you normally associate with tourist's stops like these.

You'll also find music and native performances.

music Some of the stops along the route include old colonial villages like Cierocowi at the edge of the Urique Canyon the deepest part of the copper canyon system.

This mission church dates back to the 15th century.

Step in the cool quiet, the alter is still intact, and it dates back to the mid 1700's.

The village was founded by Jesuits in 1694.

Here you can get another glimpse and yet another version of life in and around the Copper Canyon.

It is just a few miles by a cliff clinging bus ride to one of the most spectacular sites of the canyon, Cerra Del Gayaju Urique lookout puts you at 7500 feet, it is a breath taking view.

Nothing stands between you and the depths of the canyon and you might think "Grand Canyon?

Now this is a grand canyon."

Eventually you roll out of the canyon and into the flat expanses of Mexico.

Here the sky seems to stretch into infinity.

The sunset fills the frame of the train window with a portrait no artist could match.

As the sun fades you realize this trip is nearly over you might realize this is a trip you want to make again.

Spencer: Some say that men have a natural tendency to collect things, coins, stamps, magazines or sport related items.

It's time to meet a California man who's collecting top of the line brass model railroad cars, which he then put in a display case in his office.

One day, he decided, what's the point of collecting these things if I can't see them in action.

Ancr: Welcome to the Wyoming Division of the Union Pacific Railroad.

You're in a time tunnel and you may pick whatever year you like from the late 1930's to the mid 1960's.

These are the often barren and wide-open spaces of Wyoming Railroading.

What you're looking at is a combination of the memories and the fantasies of John Gray.

John: When I grew up in Boise, Idaho, I use to take the train back and forth between Boise and South Bend, Indiana where I went to school.

Cheyenne, Wyoming was the point on the Union Pacific Railroad where all the great big locomotives ran.

In the steam days, the Big Boys, and in turbine days, the large gas turbines.

And diesels, they ran the world largest diesels there.

I couldn't resist on my way to and fro South Bend Indiana, my brother and I would jump off the train and spend a few hours there and catch the next train east or west depending on the direction we're going and wonder around the Cheyenne round house and yard.

Ancr: John has such fond memories of the big blow turbines, the first and second-generation diesels and the double engine giants that pulled those trains back then.

Years later, in the 1980's, he began collecting brass models of the Union Pacific Railroad cars.

When he decided to put that collection into motion, he decided that he wanted it to big and he wanted it to be first-class.

He wanted to run long heavy brass model trains that had a tendency to be somewhat finicky.

The track would have to be flawless so there wouldn't be derailment.

It took some experimentation.

John: We found that the homasote and plywood kept moving all the time.

In order to run the long passenger trains and the big steam engines we were run on this layout, everything had to be absolutely stable.

We started over again with a spline roadbed, which is essentially quarter inch plywood ripped about three inches wide in long strips glued together and then bolted together and put in vertically where the track would run.

The advantage of the spline roadbed is that you can create long continuous strips, 30, 40, 50 feet long by gluing and bolting these splines together.

Then bending them around the curves that you want to run and create the super elevations that you would like.

You end up with something that's both very stable and without any abrupt changes in curvature or elevation, which is a smooth roadbed.

On top of that, we placed cork roadbed, and the reason we use cork, once again very stable and secondly it's very quiet.

Ancr: It's a one-man operation, which nearly takes up the 26 x 46 foot room it occupies.

It's a room which is climate controlled, once again to minimize layout expansion or contraction.

The problem free track is Walther's Code 83, which is nailed and glued to the roadbed.

All the joints are soldered and filed.

The centerpiece of the layout is a detailed replica of the Cheyenne shop facilities, as they existed in the late 1950's.

There's a realistic Wyoming mine scene that's a recent addition to the layout.

It may be a one-man operation but it took more than one man to put it together.

Phil Gazzano helped build most of the buildings and much of the scenery.

Phil: The mine scene, it's my favorite projects that I worked on this layout was quite the challenge.

I worked from photographs and prototypes and used the little artistic vices as far as the buildings but they follow the prototype fairly closely.

It's primarily built in basswood I can show you underneath and you can see what that looks like.

Quite a bit of work, it consumed about three months total construction time, eight-hour days to finish.

The coal scene is built of actual coal, lumps of coal and sprayed them with the airbrush.

The other buildings are also basswood.

The fill material is actual prototype fill material from the Cheyenne area, so it is authentic.

John: The gravel, the rockwork is all-real.

That's started because so many times I tried to explain to people that the rock around Cheyenne, Wyoming toward Laramie over the continental divide was pink.

I never got the pink that I wanted, one day I rented a town car from Hertz and drove up to the top of Sherman Hill, it turned out to be thunderstorm, lightening everywhere, and found a gravel pit there by the side of the road and shoveled the trunk of that Lincoln Continental full of about 350 pounds of crushed rocked and had it shipped back UPS, that's the rock that's on this layout.

The sand and the rock is all from Sherman Hill near Granite, Wyoming and it's absolutely pink and that's what we used.

Ancr: Even the backdrop scenery is a work of art.

Painted by an artist using reference photos taken by Gray when he traveled to wide-open and wind-swept Wyoming.

In fact, John Gray is a railroad man who started his career in the marketing department of the Western Pacific.

He left as Sr. Vice President of Intermodal and now owns his own Intermodal terminal contracting firm.

That firm operates facilities for all the major railroads.

It's that knowledge that helps give this layout an impressive level of accuracy.

He's a man who knows railroads both real and imagined.

John Gray says he can't emphasize enough that if you plan to run heavy brass trains you better make sure your roadbed and track work is extremely sturdy and well constructed.

If a picture is worth a thousands words, a new coffee table book is filled with railroad photographs is worth at least a million, the book is called; One Track Mind, Photographic Essays on Western Railroading.

It's a compilation of exquisite pictures by a man regarded by many as the best living railroad photographer in America.

We'll meet him in a minute.

First let's go to Mt.

Rainier home of the National Park and the highest mountain in the state of Washington.

If you go there we suggest that you check out a great scenic railroad.

Ancr: At 14,000 feet majestic Mr. Rainier towers over everything it surrounds.

Chugging through the foothills of this impressive natural wonder is a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of man.

The workhorse steam locomotives of Mr. Rainier Scenic Railroad.

Located in Albee, Washington about 70 miles south of Seattle on the main route into the national park, the Mt.

Rainier Scenic Railroad cuts a pretty picture when the beauty of nature is the backdrop for the power of steam.

The railroad was started up in the 1980's by Tom Murray who has logging in his bloodline and steam in his heart.

Tom: I grew up in the woods and my dad who was a logger and we had steam locomotives, and when I worked in the woods after World War II, everything was still pretty much steam.

As they started disappearing I thought it would be a shame if they all disappeared and went in the scrap heap and someone should keep track of them and try to preserve some of them.

Ancr: The one and half-hour, 14 mile roundtrip is an excursion into yesteryear.

You travel on trains pulled by meticulously maintained antiques.

Jack: We do have the only collection of the three major geared logging locomotive designs that were built in the United States that are operable.

Those are The Shay, The Heisler and The Climax.

Ancr: Steam is not just hobby or a business for Tom Murray; it's a love.

Even in his backyard he has a scaled down version of an old steam-logging railroad.

Tom: I think the best way to start, why do we have locomotives in the woods?

There are three reasons; one is the gear rig, you go up hill you put your car in low gear, a gear locomotive is always in low gear.

Although when they built the Climax, they actually built locomotives that had gearshifts.

Secondly, the engines that most people remember were rod engines they had long series of driving wheels with a long rod connected to every wheel.

This made it very difficult to take very sharp corners or very rough track.

What logging railroad were very rough in design and very sharp corners so that the gear locomotive could get over the track and the rod engine just couldn't.

Third, and quite important, big part of the gear engines make-up is the fact that all the wheels have power.

Jack: Each designer came up with their own version of what would be the best way to transfer power from the steam engines to the drive wheels using gears and drive shafts.

The whole idea of gearing and drive shafting is that the trucks would be able to swivel and move quite a bit as compared to a stiff rod locomotive.

The gearing was design to put the locomotives into low gear all the time.

Top speed of these locomotives varies from about 12-18 mph, The Shay being the slowest and The Heisler with slightly higher gear ratio and larger drive wheels being the fastest.

Ancr: The passion behind the Mr. Rainier Scenic Railroad is clearly evident.

It's a mandatory stop for those who admire the history of steam and the beauty of nature.

Music Music Music Ancr: The first thing you'll notice about Ted Benson's new book is that it's simple black and white in the midst of an all color world.

Ted: I think it's just a way of looking at things.

It's different, it's abstract, it tends to lean more toward the dramatic.

It's not a comfort zone, you're use to seeing things in color when you see them reduced to black and white in scales of gray it makes you think more about what's in the image.

Ancr: It's the allure of trains, the power, majesty, size, the sound, smell that captivates our attention.

It fascinated our fathers and mothers and will fascinate our sons and daughters.

Maybe it's because trains go from coast to coast and mountain top to mountain top, maybe it's because trains don't stop running just because it's cold outside.

Trains don't bed down for the night, they fire up and the only thing that's nearly as interesting as the trains themselves are the people who work them.

The eye, the mind and the camera of Ted Benson brings the railroad to life.

Ted: Every shot is different.

Sometimes it's just the simple depiction of this is a really pretty place, the lights just nice and the only thing that would make it better is a train going by, and; hey, the train just went by.

Other times, if your in a situation where there's a lot of human interest going on, say like covering the last run of the passenger train or first run of the Amtrak train or something like that.

The human activity is what's central to the story as opposed to the trains, the train kind falls off into the background.

The people are what make the railroading industry because you have people who have worked there all their life.

Once they get over the fact that you're not just another goofball with a camera, they get used to you being there, once you've got that access then people open up to you.

It's a piece of living history, what you're trying to do is document that.

I would have to say some of the work is journalism but a fair amount of it is documentary.

For me telling a story of a railroad doesn't necessarily mean; there's the obvious story that you do have to tell in terms of the rolling stock and equipment, the geographic location are all important.

But it's that human element that makes people want to work for a railroad or people that have an avocation interest to be intrigued enough to want to go down to the station and watch the trains go by or jump on the car and chase a freight train down the highway, or sit on the side of hill and wait for five hours for the next one to roll by.

Ancr: Ted Benson is been taking pictures of trains for nearly 30 years.

His pictures are sort of like souvenirs.

They compliment his memories and ours.

He's as powerful with his pen as he is with his camera.

A talented writer and photographer, Ted Benson wrote all the copy in the book as well.

When we look at a picture we all see what we want to see.

What did Ted Benson see?

What does he want us to see?

Ted: A real story telling image that night were the two kids in the car and nothing posed about it at all.

They were fascinated by the train; but terrified enough that they didn't want to get out too close to, they were quite happy to stay in the car and watch the engine switch back and forth.

There's a lot of long hours away from home, there's a lot of isolation, you see the train go by and the engineer waves, that must be the greatest job in the world but what you don't see the fourteen or sixteen hours held away from home and outside terminal waiting for train to come in so you can go back home and you get back to your family.

There was this image of a mother and her son transfixed in this window, the only thing that mattered just watching this train and totally oblivious to everything around them.

That's one of my all time favorite images right there.

It just says so much, not just about the train and the railroad obviously but the parents going out with children and passing the love of trains onto the next generation.

It's says a lot to me about my own childhood in growing up it's pretty much what drove that shot.

The book is the first of the masters of railroad photography series, which will be published by Boston Mills Press.

Thanks for being with us and please join us next time for more Tracks Ahead.

Music Tracks Ahead.

Brought to you by Kalmbach Publishing Company bringing you Trains Magazine very month for over 60 years And Classic Trains Magazine, covering railroading's rich heritage.

Kato manufacturer of precision railroad models and the Unitrack System Walthers Manufacturer and supplier of model railroading products, serving the hobby since 1932 The Model Railroad Industry Association a not for profit trade group for professionals in manufacturing, importing, packaging or publishing model railroad merchandise.

Music Music Music Music Music