Vol. 36: John Gray's Union Pacific Cheyenne Division
John Gray’s Union Pacific Cheyenne Division model railroad captures the vast, open spaces of Wyoming. His HO layout was designed to showcase the immensity of America’s West with broad curves and scenic sweeping vistas. The Union Pacific is a great place for John to display his huge collection of brass locomotives and cars. He believes it’s important to get them out of the box and run them both for his enjoyment and the history they impart to others.
Although John Gray is a railroad executive, he shuns the modern scene in favor of the late 1930s through the early 1960s. A variety of operating equipment can be seen on the layout, which is to John’s liking. He sees the layout as a way to recreate historical scenes and activities that he saw or wishes he had seen.
In this series, Allen Keller interviews the man behind the Union Pacific. John explains to Allen what makes his layout unflinchingly true to the West and how modelers look at most major lines. The Union Pacific is housed in its own 46x26-foot building, with a minimum radius of 34 inches and a spine roadbed. The UP is a double loop with a lower and upper line, and begins and ends on the only town on the layout, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
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2:33John Gray’s Union Pacific Cheyenne Division model railroad captures the wide open spaces of Wyoming. The HO layout is designed to showcase the vastness of the West with broad curves and scenic sweeping vistas. The Union Pacific is a great place for John to display his large collection of brass locomotives and cars. He believes
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8:35We start the tour of John Gray’s Union Pacific Cheyenne Division model railroad as a Portland with four E Units pulls out of the Cheyenne Depot. The city scape fills the area behind the depot. In front is the lead to the massive diesel shop. The ice platform supplies the huge pacific fruit express reefer
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8:20We begin operations on John Gray’s Union Pacific Cheyenne Division model railroad at the full circle roundhouse. Here Number 4023, a “big boy” train, prepares and moves off the turntable. This engine was the second to last big boy built for the Union Pacific. The massive 4884 runs light over the switch lead at Tower
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4:03John Gray’s Union Pacific Cheyenne Division runs around Cheyenne, Wyoming during the 1930’s through the 1960’s. Allen Keller asks why he chose that era and area to model. Growing up in Boise, Idaho, John states that the Union Pacific was the only game in town. When he went to school in the midwest he would
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1:44John Gray, owner of the Union Pacific Cheyenne Division model railroad mentioned to Allen Keller that he started out as a collector. Allen wonders if he considers himself more as a modeler or a collector. John thinks he is a bit of everything, both a collector and a modeler. There are various aspects of collecting
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3:18The Cheyenne Engine Facility is the centerpiece of John Gray’s Union Pacific Cheyenne Division layout. Allen Keller has never seen a full roundhouse modeled before. It is the most impressive engine facility that he has ever seen. It takes up a lot of room, being about 6 feet across or so. While it is impressive
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5:08John Gray approached the building of the Union Pacific Cheyenne Division layout a little bit differently than other people. In this video he shares his tips for planning your model layout. He hired people to do some work, like Phil Gazzano. Besides the money and the space, John contributes the information needed to know what
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4:01The rock outcropping on the Union Pacific Cheyenne Division of John Gray look so real. Because of the size of the layout and the fact that it was really built by Phil Gazzano, others and John himself, they tried to come up with methods that were not labor intensive. So they came up with a
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1:57The structures on John Gray’s Union Pacific Cheyenne Division layout are massive. It features huge engine facility buildings, huge car shops, a huge diesel facility and more. Allen Keller asks if they are exact models of the prototype. In the west, this is exactly what a person would see, large structure looming out in the
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