Transfers on the East end: It’s all the Western Maryland now.

 As I’ve told you, repeatedly, ad nauseum,  I am planning to have foreign road transfers act as a regulating device to control the traffic intensity of the switch jobs on both the East and West ends of the layout. 

After consulting the railroad atlas, and moving the WEST end of the layout 100 miles west to Charleston, WV, I settled on having the C&O, B&O, and NYC as the WEST foreign connections. 

After “Wargaming” operations on the EAST end of the layout, and after an extensive visit and discussion with Bill Hanmer, I realized that the East end was already settled; the Western Maryland.

On AIR1 the Western Maryland Railway was a huge presence on the layout. Half the through trains had WM power on them. I liked the WM, but I didn’t like all the foreign power, so on AIR2 I took the WM off my main line, but increased the WM track by an order of magnitude. 

The WM will bring cars and trains to and from Chatsworth yard for interchange with the AIR. These trains will originate in a staging yard devoted to the Western Maryland and represent that connection to our modeled world.

Western Maryland trains will enter Chatsworth yard, power and caboose will cut off, AIR power and cabooses will go on, and those trains will continue over the AIR.

In parallel there will be a WM branch that will run to Wingedfoot where the two industries located there, Wingedfoot Paper, and Wingedfoot Portland Cement, will be switched by the WM local, the Wingedfoot Switcher.

At the same time, on the AIR there will be a local switch job out of Chatsworth,  the Leesdale Local, who will switch all the local industries around Chatsworth and work west about half way across the layout and return.

The Wingedfoot Switcher will be the job that will require transfers. So since I am already building a staging yard to accommodate WM trains, and since I already own prodigious quantities of WM power and Cabooses, all the foreign road transfers on the EAST end of the layout will be WM. 

It’s all about the Western Maryland now.

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