Gorre & Daphetid RR

Pronounced Gory and Defeated; this model railroad, by early giant in the hobby John Allen, remained the gold standard for model railroading for many, many years, and has probably only recently been surpassed by guys like George Sellios in the last decade or two.  In part because Sellios is still alive and has access to better gear for his photos, whereas John Allen died in the early 70s, his house caught on fire and his layout burned less than two weeks later, and most of the surviving pictures of his layout were very old taken with what would today be considered crude equipment (although it was state of the art for the time, and Allen was a professional photographer by trade) and most of the images of the layout that survive were singed or smoked by the fire, or they are bad scans of old magazines, etc.

Allen did all kinds of things for the first time: weathering and super-detailing of structures and trains, realistic operation, scale time (including lights dimming for night-time operation), and the use of numerous scale figurines all over the layout to create the illusion of life (look at model railroads that don't have people on them; they just aren't convincing; they look dead and toylike.)  He also is renowned for dramatic scenery, including cliff-faces that literally stretched from the floor to the ceiling.  He also was adamant that he model the American West during the heyday of steam power, so his layouts were very California from before California became a de facto province of Mexico and the mob—big high Sierras and a bustling port city (called simply Port).

For many, many years, it seems that model railroaders, even professional ones, struggled to get out of the shadow of John Allen.  John Allen was to model railroading what Depeche Mode was to synthpop; everyone was either aping what he did, or reacting against it, but nobody could simply go their own way ignoring him. Guys like 70s and 80s icons Malcom Furlow and John Olson made what could almost be considered miniature pastiches of the Gorre & Daphetid in many ways; although maybe that isn't exactly fair, since EVERYONE has followed in at least some of the footsteps of John Allen in the years since with regard to, say, weathering or detailing or figure use, and they should because it dramatically improves the look of the railroad to do so.  If Allen hadn't pioneered those ideas, eventually someone else would have.  But the specifics of railroading through dramatic western scenery with a big industrial waterfront is too iconic and precise to be anything else, so when reading, for example, about my favorite small layout, the Jerome & Southwestern RR, I can't help but think that it's a 4x8 (with a 2x6 expansion) slightly tamer and easier to build G&D pastiche in most respects.  I may not have put two and two together to figure that out if the Back Alley & Wharf wasn't an obvious miniature version of Port itself.  This isn't meant as a knock against those guys, because frankly, I'd want to model a similar kind of thing myself; like many people, regardless of whether or not I'm talking about model railroading, which honestly, most of the time I'm not, I'm just a huge fan of the American west and southwest.  Even though I don't get the people that live there quite as well as I do my own people, the backwood Southerners, the reality is that the West was largely colonized by Southerners following the War of Lincoln's Aggression, and some of the southern southwestern territory was actually considered Confederate territory (the southern third, more or less, of what is today New Mexico and Arizona.)  And the environment and scenery; well, that just feels like home to me more than anywhere else in the world.  The land was made for me and me for the land—which is why it is both ironic and maybe even tragic to some degree that I've lived for nearly twenty years at the juncture of the Midwest and the Northeast, and before that I lived for more than a quarter century a hundred miles inland but still ecologically on the Texas Gulf Coast.  I have literally never—except when I was an infant too young to remember—lived in the territory that I most feel is home.

Anyhoo, one of the things that made the G&D so dramatic was not just the scenery, but the method by which the trains had to traverse them.  Gigantic bridges such as the last one Allen built, the Scalp Mountain bridge, or the four layered bridges of French's Gulch, with the really big elevation changes for the model trains (up to four or five actual feet; which, keep in mind, at 1:87 scale can be over 400 scale feet) is part of what makes the G&D so dramatic, and few—if any—modelers in years since have been quite so dramatic as John Allen.  Part of that is practical; John Allen was a dedicated modeler and photographer, a confirmed bachelor, and had the ability to devote his entire basement and twenty years of his life to making this thing, which most others cannot spare.  John Olson's J&SW, for instance, while clearly a pastiche, is limited to a 4x8 with a 2x6 expansion; the fact that he was able to do a below tabletop Apache Gorge with a big dropoff from the track to the gorge floor was pretty impressive at all given his self-imposed constraints.

Here's a few pictures of some of the most dramatic of the G&D's vignettes.  I'm especially focusing on the big bridges, because that's something that if I ever build a model railroad, I'd want to find a way to incorporate in at least some format or scope or scale; even though it'd be smaller than that done by John Allen by default.  Also, keep in mind that like I said, these pictures are considerably lower quality than what you'll see for modern railroads, but it's the best that can be done given the constraints of both the time period and the preservation of what pictures there are.

A book I own has an even more dramatic view of this curve; the most dramatic part is just to the left of the picture here.

You can see just a bit of that curve to the right here, with the stacked bridges of French's Gulch in the background in the center, and one of the bigger bridges just barely to the left of that.

Look at the stuff going on in the background.  You can see the curve again, just a bit, here.  Also, that witch's hat cupola become a layout trademark for stations; he had several of them.

One of the most dramatic instances of differing elevation on the G&D; the lower track is the lowest elevation on the railroad, while the upper tracks are nearly the highest (as you can see because they nearly reach the ceiling.)

A different shot from a slightly different angle of the same spot.

The biggest and latest of his bridges.  Sadly, it's really hard to find images of this during the "daytime."  Because it was built so late; before Allen's fatal heart attack in early January 1973, there are comparatively few pictures of it.  The next several are some different shots, though.

More of Allen's famously stacked track on multiple bridges along the same cliff face; one of his favorite spots to take pictures of engines and cars.  This is a distance shot of the whole area.

Another bunch of images of French's Gulch.

And rounding the collection out, here's some more of my favorite huge bridge.  I'm really wondering where I could fit something this dramatic in, or if I even could, with my much more modest ideas.

And finally, his Cross Junction station, one of the more memorable ideas from the G&D, plus some pastiche version of it from someone else's railroad.  It's so cool that I'd be tempted to pastiche this idea myself.