Last winter while attending the International Railfair in Sacramento I was able to purchase this Western Pacific book that I had been looking to get for awhile. While looking through the book something caught my attention. There was a mention in this book that the Southern Pacific had trackage rights on the WP between Weso to Flanigan to make a connection to their Modoc line. I was surprised that I had not been aware of this before and had to dig deeper.
Looking through some other books and on the internet I found out that this arrangement started in 1962. Prior to that the SP Modoc line had crossed the WP at Flannigan and made a connection to the SP main line at Fernley. This is a Google maps satellite view of how Flannigan looks now that I added some labels to. The scars from the old connection to Fernley are still visible many decades later.
I made up with this simplified drawing showing this arrangement. The Modoc line itself is also now abandoned and is a rail trail.
I had never considered any SP traffic coming off the WP line at Weso on the layout and all of the interchange traffic has been from SP manifest trains running east and west between Roseville and Ogden. Now I can see the possibility of also having trains running between Klamath Falls and Ogden also stopping and exchanging cars. I have already redone a couple of Freight waybills that reflect this routing.
Here is a Klamath Falls to Ogden manifest coming off the Western Pacific line at Weso and starting on the east bound paired track. This change will add an extra element of interest to operations on the layout.
