Once Darestof had been rebuilt, it was put away to enable the construction of the next town south, namely Curlew. This was started with a lot of discussion about what should go there, what would fit, etc., etc.
To start the discussions, I used an extra wide-angle lens on my iPhone to get a “bird’s eye view” of the area, with a few pieces of cardboard to set the stage.

After that, we rolled out big sheets of white paper and taped it to the cardboard, and Gordie got to work doodling away!

This went on for a while as we debated adding a “Y”, and then not, and a myriad of other ideas. I kept referring to my trusty copies of the Sanborn maps for Curlew and it looked like we could do a pretty fair approximation in that corner of where things were in Curlew.






I then “surveyed” measurements from his drawings and entered them into the CAD program to check if all of the tracks really did fit without kinks, too tight curves, etc., and overall it fit very well. I took it upon myself to add a few more tracks, thinking about the space crunch we have at Grand Forks, and produced the following plan for review by the gang.
