Finding Furlow's Denver and Rio Chama

Malcolm Furlow has always been one of my favorite modelers.  He started building a model railroad in the 1970s, and photos of his work were soon in print in all the major modeling magazines.  He was a constant presence (and a controversial one) for about a decade before he departed the hobby to pursue a successful career as a Western artist.

He built several layouts, but his home layout, the Denver and Rio Chama Western, is to me the most interesting.  It was the subject of numerous articles, typically "how-to" pieces, that detailed the construction of individual scenes, as well as two in-depth profiles; one ran in Railroad Model Craftsman in 1978, when he was just getting started, and the other in Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette in 1982. 

For all of its coverage, there was always an elusive quality about the D&RCW: when you see it in magazine photos, the pictures are almost invariably close-ups of a particular scene; when Furlow did a long shot that encompassed an entire segment of the layout, it was carefully done to make the whole appear as a single scene - there was never a point where the camera seemed to pull back far enough that you could lose your sense of seeing a discrete scene, and form a picture of the whole layout.  I think this was probably deliberate: one criticism that I have read of the railroad is that it was essentially a collection of large diorama scenes, and that it "worked" visually only in photographic formats: when seen from the kind of visual perspective that personal viewing gives, the crowding of scenery, tracks, and buildings together seemed overdone.  The phrase "Disneyfied," is sometimes used, and I have seen it asserted that the curves were so sharp that most locomotives couldn't make them if the lead wheels were in place.

As criticism, this is fair enough, but I think the builder's intent matters in these kinds of things, and Furlow clearly built it to be photographed: if the pictures worked, than the railroad accomplished his goals; QED.  I happen to think that the pictures did work in some way, and if you Google his name with "Denver & Rio Chama Western," you find approximately 186,000 results, many of them photographic.  Many of the photos that pop up show models in the state of total disrepair that he loved: obsolete equipment, rusty and dirty, and frequently of outlandish design and construction.  Not all of these results were inspired by him, of course, but many of them were - and for all that he meant his photography to be the ultimate end product of model building, there are relatively few pictures of his own work that show up.  

In other words, the Denver & Rio Chama Western is as elusive as ever.  But I think it's important to understand that people are using Furlow's work as a touchstone, even if they aren't still looking at the pictures themselves.  He is clearly an inspiration for a lot of modelers, and so it's interesting to take a look at the pictures and see what they tell us about the railroad.

Interestingly, Furlow originally meant it to be a set of modular, diorama-like scenes.  He was inspired by pictures of a module built by John Olson, and published by Railroad Model Craftsman in two articles in January and February, 1975.  The Olson articles included a lengthy discussion on what it was Olson was trying to do.  He wanted to build a railroad that was, in essence, a series of scenes, with each capturing the look of a different region or locale.  Olson called his first effort "Stop Gap Falls," and it was clearly inspired by John Allen's work, which was widely available in the modeling magazines and books in those days.

Olson followed Stop Gap Falls up a year later with an article about a second module, called "Mule Shoes Meadows."  Where Stop Gap Falls was a crossing of a river gorge deep in a mountain range, Mule Shoes Meadows was a division point on a small logging railroad, somewhere in the Wooded Sierra foothills.  When I later saw pictures of Mather on the Hetch Hetchy Railroad, or some of the larger camps on the Pickering and West Side lumber railroads, it was Mule Shoes Meadow that I thought of: they seemed like plausible prototypes.

By the time Model Railroader ran its fiftieth anniversary issue in 1984, John Olson's layout was sufficiently well developed to be the month's featured layout- and both his "Mescal Lines" and the Rio Chama were sufficiently well known to warrant a "visit" from the special "anniversary train," headed by an allegedly resurrected Hiawatha engine.  The track plan and photos for the Mescal Lines showed that Olson had largely followed through on his original vision, for the layout was in fact a beautifully executed series of distinct scenes, featuring high desert, Sierra foothills, river valleys, and even a port.  Neither of the modules made it into a track plan, but there was a tantalizing dashed line, suggesting that they might yet find a place in his miniature world.  Sadly, it seems neither ever did; the Disney career that was sparked by his modeling took off, and the layout went into storage.  The Gazette suggested a few years back that he had plans to revive it, but if they have come to fruition, I missed the report.

Furlow started out with this modular concept, and the idea of placing it in the Rockies.  He found his inspiration in the San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado, and his goal was to translate their precipitous mountainsides and white water into a model.  Since he was working in a space that was small, in terms of floor area, the ruggedness of the terrain actually made it easier to model, because he built his scenery up and down into unoccupied or unusable vertical space, creating the illusion of high mountains in a relatively small area.  

By the time his layout was featured for the first time (in Railroad Model Craftsman in September, 1978), he had a working design.  The layout was to be shaped like an E, and he began at the ends, building two sections he labeled "Chama Creek" and "Cascade Creek."  The track plan that was published in that article is unfortunately covered by copyright, but it underwent substantial revision (reflecting changes he made to the layout), and when the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette published an article covering the Rio Chama in its May/June 1982 issue, the track plan had changed substantially, with the "Cascade Creek" section change substantially, with a section labelled "Sheridan" added either in place of or around Cascade Creek  This added a town clinging to a mountainside, adding considerably to the scenic drama.  

While it is possible to trace some of the changes and improvements made to the Rio Chama over the years in back issues of Model Railroader, which published many articles by Furlow about his techniques, and many individual photos, MR never published a full article devoted to the D&RCW, which was highly unusual in those days.  Typically, when they had an author whose work appeared repeatedly, they often ran an article on that author's layout, since the pictures and descriptions in the articles often raised readers' curiosity about how it all "fitted together" on the author's home layout.  In those days, of course, the media saturation point was far lower than it is today, and a splashy cover shot with a name familiar to readers helped attract magazine sales, and Furlow's appearances were frequent.  He built project layouts (one of them, the San Juan Central, famous enough to be housed in the California State Railroad Museum's exhibit on model railroading).  He wrote articles on how he built other people's railroads - but MR for some reason never devoted an article to the topic of the Rio Chama.  

This site has an interesting collection of pictures from the D&RCW, and it includes a track plan which is derived from the NG&SLG plan.  The accompanying photos were clearly taken at different times in the layout's life, and are identifiably different.  Several of them are colorized versions of photos that were published in the 1978 RMC article in black and white, while some of the others were taken at more advanced stages of the railroad's existence.  The very topmost picture must, I think, show the railroad in its later stages, since it shows Silver Canyon with the road bridges and highway running up to Sheridan that were the topic of one of Furlow's last articles for MR.  Conversely, the bottommost picture is a colorized version of one that was published in black and white in RMC in 1978.  This is also true for the pictures identified as "Chama Creek," while the picture of engine 8 comes, I think, from the Cascade Creek area.  Another useful aid is provided by this VHS-quality video which shows the layout toward full build-out.