Times change and it brings out the beauty of what there is, sometimes we have to look harder through the mountain of shells to find the pearl, but it is there...somewhere.
Bryan, that is really a great attitude to have and thanks for sharing. When I originally moved here in the '80's, the scenery was much closer to what it looked liked during the 1950's than what it does now.
Not surprisingly, I much prefer what this area was like when I first moved here.
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A little background history:
Before the U.S. began importing sugar from the southern hemisphere cheaper than what was grown locally, the counties of Larimer and Weld in north central Colorado produced 1/3 of the sugar used in the U.S. from sugar beets.
The Great Western Railway and the Colorado & Southern provided the necessary transport from the farming fields to the sugar factories quick enough to get them unloaded before the the beets would lose the sugar content (metabolize). The efficient logistics of this process provided the communities a good and stable economy for most of the 20th century.
The first set of pics is a former sugar beet dump and small community called "Kluver" along the C&S branch. The beets were transported to the Fort Collins Great Western sugar beet factory that used to be located along Vine St, just west of the current BNSF North Yard.
After the factory shut down in the 1960's, unable to compete with foriegn sugar imports, the community of Kluver died off.
Through Trainz, I really look foward to bringing these abandoned branches back to something that looks close to what they once were.
I don't know if you can make it out, but there's a sugar beet conveyor that loaded sugar beets piled from huge stacks to the gondolas:
The Black Hollow Branch past the Larimer and Weld canal has been gone for 30 years, but thankfully still shows up on Google Earth.
From this pic, you can pick up the branch from Interstate 25, just north of Baker Lake, and follow it east as it bends downward, crosses Hwy 14 (Mulberry Ave) and curves east to Kluver, and then another couple miles east to where it dead ends at another former beat dump called "Woods" (end of track). A total of over 6 miles east of I-25:
From the County Line road heading south, this Google street view pic shows the bend at Kluver, with a white 3 rail fence that follows the radius of the former C&S rails. There's only a few places left east of the Larimer / Weld canal that still have the road bed intact. There are now a few newer homes where the old community once existed:
Here's another old pick of a high-rise used to dump sugar beets into the gondolas. The auto-loaders made these structures obsolete.
This last pic is the destination point for the beets that came west from the Black Hollow Branch. The GW Fort Collins factory on E. Vine St. was serviced by the C&S Railroad instead of the GWR. The GWR was used for all the other GW factories, with the exception of the GW Greeley factory that was serviced by the UP.
