0032 On30 Wasatch & Jordan Valley RR - On Location

It is pretty cool to live on top of a ghost railroad!  Utah is full of them, mostly old mining railroads.  Still, probably the most popular, at least to the population living here in Utah, would be the train that built the temple.

The Latter Day Saints Temple is a massive stone structure that sits outside my office window.  I see it every day and it is an amazing structure.  The Wasatch & Jordan Valley Railroad hauled the massive quart monzonite (not granite, but a similar conglomerate) stones to the temple site where they were dressed and installed.  Actually the W&JV hauled them on narrow gauge tracks to Sandy, Utah, where they were transferred to the standard gauge Utah Southern RR and then hauled down South Street to Main Street and then to temple square, just east of the structure.

I'll be modeling the railroad in 1984, about the hey day of the line and when it was at its longest trackage which was 44 miles.

The line starts up in Alta City in Little Cottonwood Canyon at the Emma Silver Mine.  It travels down the canyon under snow sheds all the way to the town of Wasatch.  It then proceeds south to the town of Granite and the quarry, which includes the Davenport Smelter.  Later it passes by another smelter and on down to Sandy and the Mingo Smelter as well as the Utah Southern interchange.  The Utah Southern then moves northward to Temple Square.  We'll model this whole line.

I've started naming the locations on the layout.  We'll have to change the Sandy area and I'll have the curve go right into the street area.  Having to move stone from one model car to another is really not easy to do, so I'll probably keep the Utah Southern as a narrow gauge line.