Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 If I have mentioned it has only been in passing, I am building my house. My Wife, Helena, and I are the ONLY two workers on the project, so it is extremely slow going. COVID has all op sessions canceled, additionally we are managing a health issue concerning Helena’s mother, who lives in Los Angeles, which caused me to cancel out of the only op session invitation I received in MONTHS, because I had to fly to LA. All my train stuff is still packed, so I do NO modeling. This is, and I am very aware of it, a big mistake. I should have spent all this time working on ANYTHING pertaining to the new layout, literally ANYTHING. We are getting very close to moving into the new house; it is literally a matter of weeks. When we are in the house I can begin to, at the very least, open boxes and LOOK at my trains! I have aggressively been buying structure kits with the goal of having a HUGE supply for kitbashing. The newest plans for the layout call for a long, linear, urban scene with a backd...

On AIR 1 a lot of people were encouraging me to put loaded coal trains on the schedule  as 3rd class trains. I resisted this because of the issues with TTTO.  If the train did not depart on time opposing extras would have to clear up, or get helping orders from the DS. If more coal was ready to move than could reasonably be accommodated in one train, does this second train run as an extra, or a following section? If we choose to run it as a following section, the first section must depart with signals, and opposing extras must be made aware of these following sections via train order. Regularly spaced 3rd class trains could be placed on the schedule, every two hours, and coal could move in these trains or in sections of these trains with the correct dispatcher involvement, but it does necessitate quite a bit of order writing.  If you were to annul one of these trains because there was no coal at that time, the annulment could carry over for several sessions, or 12 hours. ...

 Happy Armistice Day! After some investigation what I’m learning is something I seem to be plagued with concerning a lot of industries and procedures I model: timing. I model 1952. Labor was still pretty cheap, but the post war boom was on, and wages were rising. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the United Mine Workers union grew in strength, and through negotiations and strikes miners wages rose.  Before WWII coal companies were able to pay labor for menial “Coal Picking” jobs. These coal pickers worked at tipples on sorting tables, removing impurities, sizing, and grading coal; in short cleaning it.  These tipples loaded coal hoppers with clean coal. By 1952 some of the coal production was run through a prep plant, but most still was cleaned at tipples prior to loading.  As wages rose the hand sorting and cleaning of coal got too expensive for coal companies to continue and coal companies found it was cheaper and more efficient to run their coal through larger dedicated pr...

 In the 1952 steam era, coal hauling railroads established marshaling yards as collection points for coal loads. As a general rule they did not commingle general merchandise, and not because these railroads wanted to keep general freight separate from coal, but more realistically because where the marshaling yard was located 99.9% of every car load handled was a coal hopper. In this era each hopper load of coal traveled on its own waybill. When a customer ordered 165 tons of a particular size and grade of coal, I assume the railroad thought it was simpler to ship each of the three fifty-five ton hoppers on its own waybill as opposed to one bill of lading specifying 165 tons for “Richmond Public Schools (RPS)”. This does make a certain sense, steam era conductors counting waybills to count his consist. He knows he should have 18 cars total, with three cars for RPS, but counts the bills and comes up with fifteen bills? Or when writing a switch list, and he is fatigued, it’s dark, lat...

 In the steam era, and I’m willing to bet into today, coal hauling railroads established intermediate yards, between mine and final destinations, where coal loads were classified by customer, Grade of coal, size of coal, and where the weighing process took place. These were so called marshaling yards. On the Western Maryland it was Knobmount near Cumberland, MD. On the C&O, Hinton comes to mind. The N&W, Bluefield. On the Atlantic Inland Railway (AIR) it’s Pettigrew Yard. It appears that coal hauling railroads found that separating coal traffic from general merchandise allowed efficiencies in transit to be developed for their coal operations. Since the Atlantic Inland is supposed to simulate the operations of a steam era, coal hauling railroad it only made sense to build a coal marshaling yard into my operations. If you have read many (Any?) of my blogs you will no doubt have seen the name Pettigrew Yard (PY). PY is CENTRAL to operations on the AIR. Every coal hopper passes...

 I am building another large version of my Atlantic Inland Railway, or AIR2. My backdrop should be trees, the verdant hills of West Virginia. Because of this, and my laziness I am planning to use puff ball trees. For some reason I “think” puff ball trees are easy to build and install. I guess that’s true for 60’ of layout, what about 600’? However I recently saw some other backdrops made of Woodland Scenics Foliage Clusters, and they looked good. Their construction looks simple as well. I think I need to see versions of my backdrops BEFORE major construction begins, so I am mocking up three basic versions.  They all will start with a base of foam insulation board, but each version will also include different “angles or repose”, different slopes. Then I plan one with puffball trees, one with ground foam, and one with “Trees”, the so called Gary Siegel recipe. I plan the same basic ground treatment, tan or brownish latex paint, sprinkled with earth and “grass” then planted with ...