Kicking around two ideas

What should I choose?  That's the hardest question in this entire build.  With my first locomotive on the way it's time to sit down and think about what I would like to model first, and I have two options that I've narrowed myself down to:

Firstly I thought about modeling a logging camp.  These camps were temporary and would consist of one or two sidings and a passing track for trains to meet and for cars full of supplies to be dropped off inside the camp.  A good example photo that I found is this one from mendorailhistory.org

The tracks went right through the middle of the camp, kinda dangerous in the morning for the men on their way to the cook shack!

Such a design would be light on track, heavy on scenery, and would allow for a lot of creative scratch building.  The camps varied quite a lot from a line of tents to temporary hard wall structures and even modified railroad cars!  Not only that, but these camps were always located a short distance from where the men would be felling trees.  If I were to expand with more modules a natural scene would be a log landing, a place where logs would be loaded onto flat-cars and shipped down to the mill.

In places like Minnesota, these camps would be set up over the winter and taken down in the spring, thus clearing large tracts of land over the course of the winter.  In the Glacier area of Montana, these operation would likely have gone on all year round.

There's plenty of info on the logging camps themselves:

http://tworivershistory.net/big-blackfoot-railroad.html

http://bigskyjournal.com/Article/montanas-original-man-camps1

One of the more well known railroads, the Big Blackfoot Railroad, ran two Willamette shays, one of which is still in existence at the Fort Missoula Museum!

Obviously, modeling a logging camp has a lot of potential!  But the other idea I had was to model a log landing into a river with basic engine services.  Many of these railroads, especially those located in the Swan River Valley, the Blackfoot River, and the tributaries of the Clark Fork and Flathead River were dozens of miles from other railroads and thus did not have connecting track.

As the articles above explain, these logs would often be dumped into a river and sent downstream to the mill.  This was possible on the deep, fast rivers like the Blackfoot, but perhaps not as efficient on smaller streams.  And when a river couldn't be used, the railroads would be.  Sometimes, in the case of the Big Blackfoot Railroad, the railroad hauled logs from the landing down to the river and would be dumped on a spot of the Blackfoot that could cleanly float the logs several miles to the mill.  Eventually though the Milwaukee Road bought the Big Blackfoot and connected it's tracks to the mainline at the mill.

So really it is quite hard to think of what I would like to model!