The Charbonneau County Railroad is fictional, as is the town of Van Buren and the wider Charbonneau County of which it is the seat. This web site is a work of fiction, not dissimilar to a short story or a novel. It was built to support and extend a scale model layout, constructed starting in 2024.
To my mind, one of the greatest joys of model railroading is storytelling. Using three-dimensional models, it is possible to create evocative places, and given that such models move, it is possible to bring it some animation as well. For generations, modellers have also understood the virtues of the reverse: Storytelling can enhance the experience of making and playing with those models. Those modellers who get into "operations" based (at least in part) on real world railroading practices do this every time that they create a track warrant, a timetable, or a waybill.
Because I am a writer, artist, and sometime graphic designer, the idea of making narrative and graphic design a part of my hobby was immensely appealing. It is one thing to make a model of a depot, it is quite another to imagine the lives of those who might work inside, who they might be, where they might live, where they might work.
Michael Flanagan, Stations: An Imagined Journey. New York: Pantheon, 1994. This book is an inspiration for anyone with an interest in the cultural landscape of North America and its connection to the development of railways, in visual and graphic arts, and in narrative.
I have several inspirations for this part of the project. First and foremost is the late Michael Flanagan, an artist whose mock-palimpsests paintings recast real railroad places into locations on the fictional Buffalo & Shenandoah Railroad. The ultimate expression of Flanagan's project is Stations: An Imagined Journey, (New York: Pantheon, 1994), where Flanagan weaves his several paintings together with a fictional narrative about a railroad photographer in mid-20th century Virginia. The book, with its distinctive focus, did not sell well$mdash;I got my copy as a cheap remainder not long after it came out—but it is enchanting, and it is possible to find used copies relatively cheaply. There are many, many, many railroad books out there, but most focus tightly on the nuts and bolts (or shoud I say the rivets?) of equipment, or occasionally on the geopolitical intrigue of railroad building, but few so deeply tap into the imagination and sense of place, few touch on the human culture that clings like rust to everywhere that railways once ran. Stations is one of those few, and if you have even a passing interest in railway history, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I could, of course, name many model railroads as inspirations. My goals for atmosphere and laid-back operations are influenced by numerous other layouts, most notably the rural quietude of Tom Johnson's Cass County. The idea of giving almost everything a name and a story is at least in part inspired by Dave Meek's wildly fantastic and narratively rich Thunder Mesa Mining Company. The pages of Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman have had their influences, and especially the annual Great Model Railroads and Model Railroad Planning. To make a longer list would not convey much to most readers, but what would is this: The hobby has long had a streak of storytelling in it, from the fantastic places imagined by the likes of John Allen and Malcolm Furlow, to the historical realism of Tony Koester or Tony Thompson. This project obviously builds and extends much of what others before have done, and that may, in fact, be another of the appeals of model railroading for me: We are always learning from what has come before, to the point that even the most introverted modeller is not truly modelling alone.
And last but not least, this project is a tribute to the "shortlines" of my birth state, Oregon, and in a broader sense, to the Oregon that was. By the time that I was old enough to be aware of the state's railraod scene, much of it was dominated by just two big companys, the BNSF and the Union Pacific. Most of the characterful, independent shortlines were long gone, victims of the cruelties of a changing economy, their lines rusting away or ripped up, their equipment mouldering in the care of would-be museum founders with much enthusiasm and much too little capital. I still remember seeing, parked on a siding not far from my house, one of the big yellow and red Baldwin road switchers of the defunct Oregon & Northwestern, its sides pocked by corrosion, awaiting a rescue that would never come. I remember, too, the big SD9s of the Port of Tillamook Bay, and the former Portland Terminal Alco T-6 switching in the Schnitzer yards out in St. Johns. All are gone now, part of the past. And with them went a kind of railroading, scrappy, perhaps not the most efficient or safe, but so tangible, so real.
The sole locomotive of the Union Railroad of Oregon, No. 1., a 1928 Plymouth HLC 25-ton gas-mechanical switcher is see here on Dec 28, 1946, pulling a short train of cars from the junction with the Union Pacific to the mill in Union. Photograph by Philip C. Johnson, courtesy the Montana State Library.
Among them, a few real railways stand out as inflecting the character of my creation. The several municipal railways of the northwest are obvious examples, from the City of Prineville in Central Oregon, to the port-owned Port of Tillamook Bay, to the county-owned Mount Hood Railroad. In addition, several of the more obscure shortlines are influential as well: The Walla Walla Valley, the Nez Perce, and especially the Union Railroad of Oregon. This last line, built to connect a once prosperous town to the national network, serves as the most potent inspiration for the Charbonneau. Thus my model—which, to my reckoning, includes the stories I create around it and tell in places such as this site—is a tribute to these now largely absent parts of everyday, small-town life.
And lastly I should cite my web inspirations. When I first began to get serious in learning about railway history, the first place I turned was the library where I learned the joys of the Inter-Library Loan system, and the second placed I turned to was the Internet, and there I found a wide enthusiast community that included several fan-made pages on Geocities, Railroad.net, and expecially Trainweb. In fact, it was Jeff Moore's High Desert Rails page about the Union Railroad of Oregon that served as one of my chief modelling inspirations and, in turn, provoked me to consider making a fan-style web page for the Charbonneau County Railroad, something that used the language and form of Internet fan culture to add a layer of story to my layout project. And, of course, when it came time to launch such a thing, it had to be on Trainweb.
The layout began, initially, as a bookshelf concept for my small apartment, meant to be just eight feet long, and in that distance, to cram in a model representing every aspect of a shortline railroad. This stemmed from two impulses.
The "City of Podunk" was a working title for the early, apartment-based layout concept. While quite compact, this design did incorporate some of my operational goals. Its name, meanwhile, is a clear nod to the real City of Prineville Railway, and a sign that this idea of an independent, municipally owned railway was part of the core DNA of the design even at these early stages.
First and foremost, the idea of hidden or "off layout" staging has always bugged me a little. Real trains do not start and end their journeys in hidden plywood yards. Crews go on duty in real places. They stop for lunch at real locations. They do their work in a tangible world, and they finish up in a real place. If anything, one of the appeals of the physical, 1:1 railroad world is its palpable quality, it is a place with a distinctive look, a place that smells of creosote and machine oil, a place that crunches constantly under your boots. I wanted that tactile reality for the entirety of any operating experience, so that meant I wanted to model everything, and that meant that I had to look towards a shortline subject.
Second, I have had a longstanding conversation going on with several friends, some of whom are involved in digital gaming, about the concept of a game that we tended to call "shortline simulator." This spurred me to think: Would it be possible to model an entire shortline? My goal would be to have every aspect of the company represented, from locomotive servicing to track maintenance, from train operations to paperwork. Given my goal was to model the smallest of small shortlines, this seemed an achievable goal. I did not need, to take the track gang as one example, a ballast spreader, a fleet of hoppers, and flatcars loaded with ties; I could get away with a hi-rail with a portable welder in the back, a few speeder flats, a half-dozen hand tools, and a small pile of ballast. How near I will actually get to my goal is still to be seen, but in setting out to represent every aspect of a railroad company, new modeling possibilities opened, possibilities I look forward to exploring.
"Podunk 4" is clearly descended from the earlier, apartment-based design. It was drawn, as the earlier plan had been, using Adobe Illustrator, and although the general plan did fit the actual space and was ultimately built, there are several modifications to make the turnouts and minimum radius actually acheivable. (Actual radius ended up at 18".)
Eventually, the idea of an apartment layout faded against the realities of limited space that was already doing too many things, but around the same time, space atop a bookshelf opened up in a shared studio and workshop. The new space would allow for an eight-foot shelf layout that projected out into the room, with walking space on all three sides, and up near eye-height. At the fourth end, there was opportunity to expand the interchange and de-congest the plan. The result is the L-shaped plan that, in 2024, broke ground.
The design is not perfect, and there are some things that I know I would do differently next time, even as this version remains unfinished. Still, I am largely happy with this version of the Charbonneau County, and it has done what I most hoped it would do: It has inspired me, again and again, to engage in new kinds of modelling projects—including this website.
— Alex Craghead
Winter 2026
The photos and illustrations on this website are taken from a variety of sources. In some cases, they are presented exactly as they were found, the verbatim use of real images of real people and places that intersect with the fictional narrative about the Charbonneau County Railroad. In other cases, I have edited images in Adobe Photoshop to forge the line's history. I have, as far as I know, made use of images in the public domain or that are my own creation, however, for the sake of clarity and honesty, the following explains the actual source of each image.
Listed top to bottom:
This evocative scene..... This by the modeler, heavily altered in Photoshop to resemble photos made by Ted Benson on the Takima Valley Traction. Making this involved a Rapido GE 44-ton locomotive model, a Kadee 50-foot boxcar model, a very strong light, and some Photoshop work.
Hans Thielsen.... From Thos. Hines An Illustrated History of The State of Oregon, Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1893. No modifications. Thielsen was the actual chief engineer of the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company.
Col. Robert E. Strahorn.... Photo from the Spokane Public Library. No modifications. Strahorn was a frequent "cat's paw" for the Union Pacific and its many subsidiaries in the West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Walla Walla & Van Buren Railroad #10.... Photo from the Ben Maxwell Collection, Salem Public Library. Photo retouched in Photoshop. The original image showed the Oregon & California No. 33. All data relating to this real locomotive was retained in the roster on this page, except that here, the engine was built by Baldwin for the W.W.&V.B.R.R., not the O.&C..
Map of the Charbonneau Electric Railway.... Map drawn by the modeller.
F.M. Arndt (Sr.), Superintendent of the Charbonneau Electric Railway.... Photo from the Ben Maxwell Collection, Salem Public Library. Photo heavily retouched in Photoshop. The original image shows locomotive engineer La Vern Holman in the cab of the Longview, Portland & Northern No. 80, an 80-ton (rather than 44-ton) GE diesel-electric built in 1943. The photo was made in 1961 at Grande Ronde.
The Charbonneau County Railroad's modern logo.... Design by the modeller.
This view of the line between Charbonneau Junction and Van Buren.... Photo by the modeler, in this case actually of the old Southern Pacific Wellsdale Branch, north of Corvallis. This really was taken in 2011, but this is obviously the far wetter "West Side" of the state.
Michael Flanagan, Stations: An Imagined Journey. ..... Pantheon Books.
The sole locomotive of the Union Railroad of Oregon, No. 1.. No modifications. This image is sourced as noted in the caption, from the Montana State Library.
