Welcome to the Columbia & Okanogan Railway

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Introduction

The Columbia & Okanogan Railway is an N scale model railroad based on the actual Cascade & Columbia River Railroad, BN's former W-O Branch, in north central Washington state. In September, 1996, operation of the branch was taken over by RailAmerica Corporation as their Cascade & Columbia River Railroad. The line runs from Wenatchee to Oroville, Washington, along the Columbia River to Brewster and then along the Okanogan River to Oroville. The railroad serves the towns of Entiat, Pateros, Brewster, Omak, Janis, Cordell, and Oroville. Products shipped include lumber and forest products and by-products, grain, and sand and gravel. The railroad also delivers large electrical generation components and such items as turbine elements to three hydroelectric plants: Rocky Reach Dam, Wells Dam, and Chief Joseph Dam. Information about these three dams and others throughout the Pacific Northwest may be found at the following: Hydroelectic Information for the Columbia and Snake Rivers

Surprisingly, despite running through some of the richest fruit orchard country in Washington state, the railroad carries none. Virtually all the fruit crop in the upper Columbia and Okanogan river valleys is trucked out these days.

The layout also represents the Cascade & Columbia River's interchange with the Burlington Northern Railroad, now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. This occurs at Wenatchee, Washington. The railroads meet at W-O Junction (also called Olds Junction) with the shortline having trackage rights into Appleyard.

The New Columbia & Okanogan Railway

The new layout, called the Columbia & Okanogan Railway (CORY), is the fourth layout to model the route. When the first layout was built, it was called the Great Northern Cascade Railway (GNC) but eventually its name was changed. There were two reasons: first, after reading an article by fellow Layout Design Special Interest Group member, Bob Warren, on the naming of railroads I realized that the GNC did not have a railroad-sounding name; second, I grew tired of jokes about my "General Nutrition Center trains."

The first layout was built in 1983 and its fictional basis involved the spinning off of the W-O branch as a shortline shortly after the BN merger in 1971. The third incarnation of the model railroad presumed a connection to the Canadian Pacific via Okanogan Falls and Penticton, British Columbia, with the CORY acting as a bridging route along the east side of the North Cascades. Except for this fictional through-connection, my shortline predated actual history by just over 25 years (and its name managed to bracket that of the Casacde & Columbia River Railroad's to boot). Taking advantage of our move to Colorado in 1998, I undertook to design and construct an altogether new layout. The plan presented here represents progress towards that goal.

The new Columbia & Okanogan Railway consists of two portions: the BN Loop, which represents Burlington Northern Santa Fe traffic through Wenatchee, Washington, and the CORY Branch, which represents the line from Wenatchee to Oroville. The BN Loop is a 12x16-foot loop, most of which is hidden beneath the CORY Branch. The loop contains a visible subdivision yard, Appleyard, and two staging yards, called simply the Small and Large Staging yards. The CORY Branch rises from W-O Junction just north Appleyard and travels above the BN Loop and out onto two peninsulas before ending at Oroville. Along the way it passes Rocky Reach Dam, Entiat, Brewster, and Omak.

The CORY Herald

Part of the art of freelance prototype model railroading is to base as much of your fictional railroad's practices and "heritage" on its prototype. Being one of the eight or so people who really liked Great Northern's Big Sky Blue scheme and their 1968 Rocky mountain goat herald, I knew I wanted to come up with something that implied that my railroad had it roots in the Great Northern Railway.

The herald of the Columbia & Okanogan Railway was developed from a needlepoint cougar that my wife, Terri, made for me several years ago. We met at Washington State University, the mascot of which is the Butch the Cougar. When I was inventing the former Great Northern Cascade Railway, a cougar herald appealed to me. Its resemblance to the predecessor Great Northern's 1968 Rocky herald was intentional. Later when I settled on the new name of my model railroad, the Columbia & Okanogan Railway, I searched lists of reporting marks to select a unused abbreviation. Obviously C&O was used, and the CORX belonged to Coors, but CORY was not on the list. So CORY it was. CORY also made an obvious name for the Columbia & Okanogan's mascot, Cory the Cougar. Then, only a few months later, I discovered that the scientific name of the western cougar is Felis concolor coryi. Serendipity had struck!

Along the way, I became familiar with Benn Coifman's tremendous railroad typefaces. He offered in his notes to convert heralds to typefaces. So I sent along my cougar herald and low and behold, it came back as a Type I Postscript typeface! He has rendered many railroads' characteristic typesets and one was Great Northern's, which he call Empire Builder. It forms the lettering seen above which also happens to match the Big Sky Blue type styling. Then I made decals courtesy of RailGraphics. Most of my locomotives are now painted in my own green and yellow (ala MKT) colors as shown above. To see Benn's offerings, click this: Benn's web site.

Click here to see how it all comes together on various pieces of Columbia & Okanogan rolling stock.

oNeTrak

What do you do while you're waiting to start "the big layout"? You build modules! In our case, we have built several oNeTrak modules and two more are under construction. To see what we've come up with, that what's in the works, please click here.

Previous Layouts

To see past incarnations of the Columbia & Okanogan Railway, please click here.

How I Did It

Two programs proved invaluable in presenting the Columbia & Okanogan Railway to you.

First and foremost is Deneba System's Canvas 7, the closest thing to a Swiss Army Knife in personal computer software. I used it to design the layout plan presented here. I used it to draw the various heralds here, including the Cascade & Columbia River Railroad herald which adorns caps and t-shirts of CSCD employees. I used it to render the various drawings here into JPG and GIF files for this site. Even the background pattern owes its existance to Canvas. Canvas has excellent page layout and painting tools as well. It even has web design tools. All in all, it's just plain fun to use. For more information, click on this link: Deneba.

Next is Optima System's PageSpinner, an HTML editor of the Mac OS, which reduces the esoterica of building a website to point-and-click simplicity. For more information, click on this link: Optima Systems.

Disclaimer and other Legal Stuff

All reference to actual railroads (Cascade & Columbia River Railroad, Burlington Northern Railroad, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad) is intented only to relate the context of the model railroad to its geographic and railroad prototypes. Use of their heralds is only for artistic purposes and in no way implies any endorsement by the actual railroads. This site is presented as a private publication for non-commercial, hobby purposes only.