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.