Appalachia, VA. These car loads were known as “Yellow Balls”
because the hoppers were marked with large yellow dots and
are stenciled with “Andover Service Only”. When cars needed
anything more than minor repair or were wrecked they were
generally scrapped on site.
Some other aspects I wanted to include in the new design were
a section of track where the Southern would have track-age
rights over the L&N. This section of track will be a single track
mainline. The L&N Corbin-to-Atlanta mainline travels through
a beautiful but relatively unknown gorge just south of the
Kentucky-Tennessee Line following Hickory Creek. I chose this
Virginia Southwestern - 4
4: I mounted the aluminum equipment frame to floor.
Holes were drilled into the concrete floor and secured
with Wedge Anchors. With mounting the frames to
the floor I need to be fairly accurate with my locations.
Moving benchwork around is not much of an option
without a lot of extra work.
4
area to be
modeled as
the joint track
section.
I also needed
more indus-
tries and gen-
eral freight
traffic, along
with inter-
changes for
better opera-
tions. On the
old Thornhill
Division I had
far too many
cars. There
were virtually no non-coal industries to justify the number of
general freight cars I had. Some of the new industries to be
included are a paper-container plant, plastic pellets, composite
polymers distributor, chemical lime/limestone plant, feed mill,
textile plant, and mine and mill supply.
The new layout has some operational differences from the
prototype. The L&N had trackage rights over the N&W from
Norton to St. Paul beginning in 1974 due to the Southern not
being able to handle (or not wanting to handle) the inter-
change traffic from Norton to the Clinchfield at Miller Yard. On
the new layout I’ll have the L&N control Norton Yard and the
N&W will run with trackage rights into Norton. The layout will
have a north-south orientation while the prototypes are actu-
ally east-west.
5: View of the inside curved section of
vertical aluminum posts' floor mounting.
Every leg is anchored to the floor
providing a very sturdy layout base.
5
MRH-Sep 2013
