Early thoughts about a possible future layout

[faraway]

Reinhard, have you joined the Santa Fe Railway Historical & Modeling Society? <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.atsfrr.com">http://www.atsfrr.com</a><!-- m --> There are also a couple of Santa Fe Yahoo groups that have a lot of information that are free to join. I model Santa Fe, but my main interest is So. California, so I'm not familiar with Texas. Gary may be able to help you out there.

I am a member of the Yahoo Santa Fe group. There has been a similar question some time ago with a list of possible locations. I did scan the locations and visit them with Google. They are all much more north. In Kansas etc. the Santa Fa had much more short lines to serve the wheat farming. The other observation is that locations with interesting traffic are too large to be modeled and possible after scale down fitting locations have no interesting traffic.
I do assume I did also think in the wrong direction. It would be very unlikely by the way how RR operate to exchange cars/cuts on the route between locals. That would lead to the situation to send a car for customer X to classification yard A to be exchanged with an other local origin in classification yard B for delivery. That would result in chaos in the hierarchical system. The car would go to classification yard B and be delivered by the local origin in B.
Exchanging cars between locals on the route would be great fun for us modelers but it would seriously hamper the way RR work. However, there might be exceptions where it is done but that are exceptions I do want to have as a base for the next layout. It should be a common process I model.