What is the Snaggletooth River Railway?

As noted in my layout overview, the SRR is a "what if" scenario of the Dominion Atlantic Railway (DAR). Essentially the DAR became part of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1911. I decided that this is where I would change history and rather than have the CPR take control, a local group of business men headed by a local logging and mining railway, The Kilmister Logging and Mining Co. and the Hexenkessel chemical factory. The principal here was that they wanted complete control over the future of freight tariffs.

Freelance - Prototype means that I have a fictitious railway that operates using prototype (or real) railway practices. The aspect of the freelancing does give me some flexibility though as I wanted the flexibility to run what I wanted to, but needed a plausible story to do so. I decided to set the date of my railway date as fall of 1979 as I liked the rolling stock look and feel of the mid to late 70's, so to keep with prototype practice you will not see any cars with a build date of 1980+. I also only wanted to run some steam. My plausibility for this is one, the railway only buys used equipment, two, the passenger service was very tourist orientated and the steam complimented this, and three if you own the source of fuel, the coal mine, you want to exploit that for as long as possible. The idea is that Steam still sees some work on the passenger lines, particularly the tourist specials and branch lines that require the lighter engines as track needs to be upgraded. Most everyday work is now done by diesel power.

This is my way around not modeling the "transition" era, but still having my steam engines make an appearance.

Why Snaggletooth? I rejoined the hobby in 2000, sparked by the band Motorhead and the song "Riding with the Driver", a song about the engineer Casey Jones. The mascot for Motorhead is called Snaggletooth, and as a homage I adopted it. The lead singers last name is Kilmister, hence the name of the railway that took over the DAR. In my version of history, early European settlers misunderstood native legends of the wolves of the area, thus misnaming them "Snaggletooth", thus the name of the river. Needing a new name for the new DAR, the Business men took the name of a local "legend" and a ancient heraldry of a wolf  as their logo.

Overall I am very happy with this blend of fiction and reality as it gives me a firm place and time, which gives me plausible freight and passenger service, but the flexibility to add my own elements and touches.