Railfan Trip, part 2

After crossing the Apalachicola River, I stopped in a couple of small towns, including Sneads, which had very little to show for their railroad heritage. The next town with anything worth mentioning was Cottondale, which is the subject of today's post.

As I've mentioned before, Cottondale is one of the towns I'm modeling on my layout, primarily because I have a mainline grade crossing and I wanted to make it plausible by modeling it as a junction interchange with another railroad. In Cottondale the L&N line crosses the Atlanta & St Andrews Bay RR (now just called the Bay Line). There were (and still are to some extent) several interchange tracks, as well as some spurs to serve local peanut and probably cotton warehouses.

Here's the line looking west as it enters town:

The siding at right looks pretty dilapidated, but fortunately there's still evidence of what it was once used for:

This is a coal conveyer. It was used to transfer coal from hoppers on the siding to trucks parked under the chute at the right end. Here's another view:

There's a bin under the rails where coal could be dumped from the hopper and then carried up the conveyer to be dumped into truck beds. This is a great little detail piece and an easy "industry" to model in a small space. And Walthers is kind enough to produce a model:

The main industries in Cottondale appear to have been peanut warehouses. Here are a couple that were trackside:

Pretty typical early/mid-1900s elevator and warehouse type buildings that I could easily find similar models for.

Next we get to the junction itself. This view is looking northeast:

The Bay Line is running north/south while the L&N/CSX runs east-west. Finally, here's a view of the Bay Line main looking south:

The freight house is an unremarkable concrete block structure, probably newer than the 1950s. From here the Bay Line continues south to Panama City. My layout will have a single interchange track like the one swinging off to the left of the gondola in the photo above, where I can drop off and pick up cars as if they were left by the Bay Line.

Cottondale was one of the most interesting towns on my trip. I'll have at least one more installment that includes Chipley, DeFuniak Springs, and the bridge at Milton.

Railfan Trip, part 1

Last month I had the opportunity to drive from Tallahassee to Pensacola, so I decided to take US Highway 90, which parallels the Seaboard/L&N (now CSX) route that I'm modeling. I wanted to get photos of any depots, industries, and other trackside buildings that might be useful guides for modeling.

Unfortunately, very little remains of 1950s railroading along this route. There are only a couple of depots remaining, and not much of interest in the way of trackside industries. To top it off the weather was cold and overcast, so it didn't make for great photography. Nevertheless I got some decent photos and found a few gems.

I'll describe the trip from east to west, Tallahassee to Pensacola. I've posted photos of the Tallahassee stations before, so the first photo comes from Chattahoochee:

Here's the yard at River Jct. (Chattahoochee). It bends off to the right, and the wye--long since dismantled--would have been located just to the left of the bend (upper center). Historically this was where the L&N and Seaboard met end-to-end, so the yard served an interchange purpose. Not sure what they use it for now, but it still has about the same number of tracks as it would have in 1951.

Just west of Chattahoochee is the bridge over the Apalachicola River. This is the first time I've seen it in person. There's a small park on the river bank just north of the bridge so I hiked along the bank a ways to get some shots.

I was in luck today, for just as I started shooting this appeared:

I'm pretty sure those are Union Pacific units in front. I've seen UP units a couple of times on freights coming through Tallahassee, probably some sort of lease agreement. Anyway, it's hard to tell for sure but this looks like it might be a swing bridge similar to the one over the Blackwater River in Milton.

That's all for this first installment, I'll post more soon from this trip. And as promised I've got more progress to show on the layout so that'll be coming soon as well.

First Train

At long last, I've powered the rails and run a train for the first time on the ol' Longleaf Layout! Last month I went down to the local hobby shop and bought an Athearn Seaboard RS-3 that I've had my eye on for months. And of course, I couldn't come home with a brand new locomotive and not actually run it, so I bought an inexpensive Atlas powerpack so I could try it out. I cleaned off as much of the mainline as I could and clipped a couple of alligator clips from the pack to the rails. Lo and behold, it ran! Not only that, but it ran smoothly up and down the helix, pulling six or seven cars. That's a relief, because at about 2.3%, my helix's grade is a bit higher than conventional wisdom recommends. Here are some photos:

Here's the first train pulling through the grade crossing with the Atlanta & St. Andrews Bay RR at Cottondale. Notice that Herman has moved his business here from Chattahoochee.

Here's a closeup of Seaboard RS-3 #1654 as it rolls through Cottondale. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to discover that this very unit was built by Alco in December 1950, so it's just a few months old here on my layout's Spring 1951 setting. By the way, this is a standard Athearn unit, and you can see even in this photo that the detail is far superior to Athearn locomotives from the 1980s when my brother Marty and I were active in the hobby.

Finally, an L&N caboose brings up the rear. This was a Christmas gift from Marty, and was the exact same model I was planning to get (practically the only L&N caboose currently available unless you go for an obscure craftsman kit). It looks great on the rails!

So there's the first train, a watershed moment. I've actually made a fair amount of progress on the layout since I last posted, and I also have some photos from a railfan trip along the prototype route, so stayed tuned for more new content in the next couple of weeks.