Railfan Trip, part 3

After Cottondale, the next stop on my trip was Chipley. The original depot is gone, but this freight house is still standing. It's been restored and is used for community events and markets. The whole station area is now a park, but you can still see remains of several tracks running through that indicate this was once a busy place.

After Chipley I headed west and stopped in DeFuniak Springs. They have a nicely restored depot, probably in the best shape of any along the line.

The depot has been turned into a local historical museum, and there were great finds for the modeler, including this old photo of the depot, showing additional freight houses around it.

Even better were these photos of local businesses. Even though I'm not modeling this town on my layout, these still offer some great ideas for buildings to add elsewhere.

My last stop and destination was Milton. I've posted photos of the Milton depot before, so this time I'll just show the swing bridge over the Blackwater River.

This bridge appears to be the same style as the one I photographed on the Apalachicola River, and I'm told a similar bridge was once located across Escambia Bay as well. This bridge is still operational--my wife (who's from Milton) tells me she remembers traveling down the river on their boat and blowing their horn to alert the bridge operater. He would come trotting out of a nearby shed and operate the bridge from the small structure in the middle. The bridge swings on the large pivot located under it's center. There's a working model of this bridge on the layout housed at the Milton depot.

That's all for my December railfan trip. As I mentioned before, there wasn't a lot remaining from the heyday of railroading, but I managed to find a few nuggets to inspire my modeling. In other news, my latest order of track and turnouts arrived yesterday, so if I get some free time this weekend I'm going to try to complete the entire mainline and get it wired up. We're thinking this could be our last weekend before the baby comes though, so there are lots of chores to do!