This is one of my favorite books about narrow gauge railroading. It is all there, the construction, the competition between the GN and the CP, rail barges and what industries the rail traffic was based on.

The book includes a lot of large photographs of the spectacular scenery and the western type structures of the towns. Most of the towns have maps so you can see what the switching would be like in each town. It was fun to read about the confrontations between the GN and CP in the area. Both the GN and the CP built in the area because they expected a large amount of ore traffic. While there was some traffic for a few years, in the end just the CP was left and then most of the area was served by trucks. A lot of construction was on the shore line between the mountains and the long lakes used for barge traffic which made for good modeling ideas.

This would be a great area to model with water, mountains and western structures. I used content from this book a lot when I was thinking about my railroad and if I end up with a train barge operation, it was inspired by this book. For me, the most important thing about this book is how complete it is concerning the railroad operations in the area. I am building more for simulation of operations then modeling, so knowing what produced the income, what the track layout was and how the trains were run is very important for me.

I did not want to model all the trees and still don't know if a barge operation would take less space than a staging track. So I am and will be inspired by my favorite book but will not model the Kaslo and Slocan.Railroad