ErikGorbiHamilton wrote:May I present: The Mississippi And Midwestern Railway
Although the name suggests the route is based in Mississippi (it almost was!) it's not. The MMRY runs from Alton Illinois to Jerseyville Illinois with a branchline to Grafton Illinois and a interchange track across the Mississippi river to West Alton Missouri to an interchange with the Burlington Northern. The mainline follows the Mississippi river and route 100 to the small community of Lockhaven Illinois where the branchline to Grafton splits off with the mainline north to Jerseyville.
We are modeling the line as if it were a early to mid 1990's bridge line (like the Riverside Waterton & Atlantic)
I say! What an interesting route plan... Can't wait until it's done.
I guess I'll give the background info then as I recognize the route.
Much of the line was once apart of the Chicago, Peoria, and St. Louis Railroad (go look that up if you wish, I don't want to add another paragraph to explain that road), but the line closed in the 1930-1940's from Lockhaven to Jerseyville. The line from Lockhaven to Alton and the Grafton Branch was bought by the Alton and Eastern in 1904 I believe, and was later merged into the Illinois Terminal Company, and survived until 1955, when the railbus (it's preserved in St. Louis' Museum of Transportation.) terminated it's journey in Alton, an interesting thing about the line, was that it was the only section of the IT's Steam Division to see passenger service. The last section was the West Alton to Alton section, which was closed by the Burlington Northern due to better tracks into St. Louis via trackage from the Frisco Merger, which hurt the IT by the way as they lived off the BN traffic, the bridge closed in 1988, in this route, those lines's trackage had been taken over by the Mississippi and Midwestern instead of being abandoned, or were later restored to operation.
Realistic history aside as it's a fictional route of course, I'll now talk about how we came up with the idea.. Erik was talking about half of the story, we all wanted our own things, some of us in the group wanted hills, others paper mills and plains, so when Midwest, Mississippi, won, it somehow turned into a road connecting the IC and BN (Former Frisco) in Mississippi, however it was 70 or so miles in length, so we cut it down a bit to 40 miles, scrapping the BN connection, however one of us pointed that the line was really flat and for that distance it was gonna be likely boring, so someone looked up the Mississippi to see if there was anywhere where we had what we pretty much all wanted in one way shape or form, the Alton Bluffs looked promising so the map was shown to the group, and it was thought that it might be a better route so it was chosen.
Here's some shots when I was testing out the signals and markers.
20170807185333_1.jpg
20170807173624_1.jpg
I hope you'll all like the route when it's finished. If you would like to help on this project please let Erik know! You have to join the discord in order to talk with the other members working on the project.
Thank you!
~Matthew Kundrick, Dragonmdk on Discord.
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Can't wait to see how this turns out! 
