Good Choice

I may be doing the same thing. I like having a name that describes where the RR is located.

Your RR is looking really good for being 8yrs old.

Jack

How things started and what they became

I'm digging through some old pictures looking at the evolution of things on the layout. This the early beginnings of the MClanahan Gorge and Bishop Mill scene and how it pretty  much looks today although there have been changes even since the last photo was taken. In the first picture, I've yet to have added the front benchwork extension where the mill now sits.

Michael,

For what it's worth, I like the name change (and the scene that inspired it!) 

Be well, 

Marty

Thanks Marty

It's worth a lot actually. The whole railroad is a culmination of things I've learned from people like you and many others who have contributed to the hobby press over the years.

Shades of John Allen

Michael,

Ever since the first time I saw picture of John Allen's layout with the multi-bridge gorge, I loved seeing similar scenes. Yours is excellent, and I love the dam and mill at the bottom. I wish I could duplicate something similar. There's something about it that is quite inspiring.

Thanks for sharing that.

Have fun! 
Best regards,
Geoff

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

but the right name might speed up the sniffing process :> )   Hi Michael, your trees do give me a north west more than an eastern vibe so the name change makes sense.  BTW, I think one reason I always preferred Whit Towers articles to John Allen articles was their railroad's names, I could identify with Alturus and Lone Pine but I'd never been to Gorre or Dephetid :> ) .....DaveB

Thanks everyone...

It's known that even John tired of the name "Gorre and Daphetid" but as famous as his pike became, he felt he was stuck with it. I came up with "Blackwater" long ago, based on my penchant for making the base color of my water features mostly black. Then I added the variations of blue to the name in order get the tongue in cheek "Black N' Blue" moniker while keeping a somewhat conventional name. Seemed like after that, the name Blackwater started popping up everywhere I looked. There is a place called Blackwater on Vancouver Island where the prototype for the famous Jack Work  coal mine was located. It just seems totally natural to create the fictitious Blackwater Island and peg it's location somewhere in that same area and the barge operation is a nice way to give the railroad an also fictitious connection with the Northern Pacific which ran in the general area as well. I picked up my NP RS-1 simply because I liked the color scheme but all the puzzle pieces just seem to fit together really well for my artistic impression of reality.

John gets a bad rap  sometimes for his multilevel trackplan being a "spaghetti bowl" and unprototypical but it was the only way to get the operations he wanted in his space. I've always enjoyed the "unwrapped" version of his plan that he drew. In my case, I knew I wanted that multi level look so I used a switchback and a 4% grade to get it. My trains are short anyway and no one can say a switchback isn't prototypical for my type of railroad and era. The grade is actually hidden behind the scene in the photo and if we ever get to build our new house here and I move the layout, I hope to make that part of it a peninsula and model the other side with some of the grade exposed.

In any event, anytime my work gets even remotely mentioned in the same breath or post as John's then I know I've done what I set out to do when I was only eight years old, standing in a hobby shop and opened "Scenery For Model Railroads" and saw the centerspread of French Gulch and Drains for the first time.

Really beautiful

I always love to see your byline and immediately turn to your submissions. I am never disappointed. I enjoy your work and always learn something and get new ideas. I model in N scale but I find everything transfers. I am a John Allen fan and enjoy his work still, much as yours. Thank you for taking the time to share.

Richard

Wow, thank you for the

Wow, thank you for the generous praise Richard. It means a lot to me to know that other people get something out of my creative vision. I worked in N-scale for years but I finally got to where my nerves couldn't take fiddling with putting MT couplers and such together anymore so I made the switch to HO about a year or two before I started this layout.

Kudos on another year of railroading

Time seems to fly when you let it 

Keep at it following along 

So poking around my photo

So poking around my photo archives here on the site, here's another before and after sequence...

I'm going to do one more of

I'm going to do one more of these and then move on. The first pic is a very early concept period when I was still kicking around ideas. I still have that modified New River Mining structure somewhere. It just doesn't really fit with my era and theme. I went with the older Jack Work style tipple...

And this is what eventually became of the area, you can see the small town of Blackwater and Harry the Horse makes an appearance...