The Foothills Railroad

[packers#1]

Been a while since I started one of these threads, so I feel a bit like Ricky Bobby and I don't know what to do with my words! But I guess the best place to start at is the beginning, so we'll start with a bit of backstory and then dive into where this layout is at so far.

I've always been a fan of trains as long as I can remember, which is weird because I don't have much family history with them at all. I started out with a Thomas the Tank Engine figure 8 set as a kid (I still have the original Thomas and the wooden bridge from it, I'll eventually do something with that as a display I think). More wooden track and trains followed, and then a Life-Like HO scale set, which became an HO Bachmann set, and eventually a tub of N scale trains I would set up on a bit of MDF I kept under my bed in my bedroom. That graduated into some layouts, but primarily of the roundy-round variety. I never could figure out switching and never got the wiring progressed that far. Then came college and disc golf and I took a break from actively building models, but kept up with the hobby press and this forum here. After graduating, I dug the N scale trains back out and tried to build some switching layouts based off the industrial park I worked in, and then a freelanced but much closer to reality short line that I developed after playing around with a lot of different set-ups with Kate Unitrak. However, I kept getting frustrated with how small N scale is compared to how big my fingers are (my wife made me remeasure my ring finger and then measured it herself when I told her I needed a size 15 ring). This is not a knock on N scale, I just can't work in that tiny of a scale thanks to my sausage fingers. A move to HO was in order.

I bought a few switches and set up what I thought was a slick little switching layout, but I soon became disappointed with it. My primary complaint was how the two spurs branched off the main and the head room for actual operations. I also finally figured out how to search for shoreline videos on YouTube like the pro disc golf videos I watch and found a couple great operations to mimic. I kicked around several ideas:

1) combining the Livonia, Avon, and Lakeville trackage in Avon, NY, with the Seneca Canning Spur the WSOR switches to get my preferred mix of industries and a switcher/road freight interaction.

2) copy the way the Nashville and Eastern operates, in particular the junction between the main from Nashville to Lebanon and the branch to Old Hickory. Once again, I would change the industries and setting but operate as a branch train meeting the manifest between the two big regional yards.

3) combine the track layout from my hometown of Aiken, SC, with the Pickens Honea Path branch to reach the right balance of operation and industries.

Ultimately, I chose Option 3. Options 1 and 2, while nice ideas, would result in the layout feeling cramped, repeating the sin of the first go at creating a switching layout. About the only free area of Upstate SC that doesn't have trackage but "could have" had it is Taylors SC down towards Woodruff and Union. In my world, this is another remnant of the Piedmont and Northern, a Duke family company that kept being thwarted by the Southern Railway when they tried to connect the Spartanburg to Greenwood main with the Gastonia to Charlotte main. The story goes like this: "When the Duke family was creating their interurban empire of electrified lines which would soon become the Piedmont and Northern, they tried connecting a third area of the state. Aiming to approach Charlotte from the South and connect it to their Greenville lines, a line from Taylors to Union via Cashville and Woodruff began construction. Outside Woodruff, the line split into two mains, one towards Union (aiming to cross the Charleston and Western Carolina/ACL) and the other aiming for the state capital, Columbia. Ultimately, this line was unable to cross the Southern in Taylors due to yet another loss in the courts, but did tie in with an interchange; a second connection was considered further down towards Spartanburg but was unable to be built. Not being able to connect the lines, this became nothing more than a short branch line from Taylors to outside Woodruff, serving a textile mill and the usual agriculatural industries of the rural Piedmont region." My current layout is the junction of the two lines, based off the trackage in Aiken, SC, where the original Charleston and Hamburg railroad split off to Edgefield and Hamburg.

Layout Stats:
main shelf: 20" deep by 9 feet
Staging extension: 2.5 feet by a few inches
Curve extension: 2 feet by 16"
 The track plan is not much more than a run around with two industries, a transload and what is currently being used as a box plant spur. Once Phase 2 is built, the box plant will move onto there, and this spur will become a lumber yard. Phase 2 will also include a Fertilizer Dealer like on the Pickens Honea Path branch and a passing siding which is used to store off-spot cars, a practice both the Pickens and Carolina Piedmont (the local shortline in the town I live in) use. Staging for phase 2 will be a cassette; right now I just run the train to and from the little extension in the upper left, with the locomotive parked in town. I am also leaving the options to other industries and ideas open, including having a small peninsula to model a roofing shingle plant where the box plant would go; the future of that industry would be TBD but I would certainly include it, as they're a great source of a variety of traffic and can be used to model some fun car movements.



This photo shows the left half of the layout. The engine is parked on the run-around track, with the junction switch in the foreground. The boxcar and plastics hoppers are parked in the transload spur, which is one of the two old mainlines. Yes, that is close to the edge of the benchwork, a bit closer than I originally planned but the line wound up with a slight curve so it wouldn't be parallel to the benchwork. I think I will ultimately build a small scene extender to plug into the front; for now I just keep the cars further down the main. There's a screw in the foam right now to prevent cars from rolling off the layout. The brown boxcar in the back is on the staging extension.


Here, the boxcars in the back are on the current box plant spur (will be a lumber yard in the future). The runaround and main are in the foreground and come to a curved switch. Right now I have just enough track beyond the switch for a locomotive. Eventually this will extend to phase 2 once we can move the home office into the guest room. For now I just plan the switch moves so I don't need to move more than the locomotive and worst case I'll break the stage magic and 0-5-0 cars onto the other track every once in a great while.


So that's where I currently am. Everything is temporarily connected while I make sure all the track works; every piece of rail has a feeder and the frogs will eventually be wired to a Tam Valley frog juicer. So far it's been a lot of fun and the two industries are giving me the chance to have a lot of different car movements. Once phase 2 is built this is going to be a rather fun little layout! Next steps are figuring out what I want to do as far as town buildings and roads in the back and adding N scale roadbed to get a little vertical relief in the rail. I know I'll have at least one store, probably a small restaurant or convenience store, house that's been converted into some sort of office, a couple actual houses, and the lumberyard building. Otherwise we'll see if anything else jumps out as a good spot filler or if it's a perfect spot for negative space.

[Philip H]

Pickens? My favorite GE powered railroad? Sweet.

[packers#1]

Pickens? My favorite GE powered railroad? Sweet.

Yessir, I’m hopeful at some point to be able to build a Belton Jct model and the actual Honea Path branch, but I don’t have the space to quite do it how I’d want to with this. I am on the lookout for a good deal on a DC U18B to do one of the Pickens ones, along with a 8-40B. I’ve got the Geep and a preorder for a GP30u for the Greenville and Western models.

[packers#1]

Well it has been a minute since I've posted. In that time I've ran the railroad and been insanely busy with work and life. However, I have a new job at work that's more internally focused than externally, and while still does have stress, it is a kind of stress that I handle much better than what my previous role had devolved into over the past year and a half. So with that, I finally had the mental capacity to honestly analyze this layout while I was running it, and ultimately I've decided that the phase 1 track plan was more convoluted than it needed to be. As such, I've simplified it to a standard passing siding with a spur off each track in that siding; phase 2's planned general track arrangement is unchanged. Let's take a tour of how this section will operate:

First, the mainline coming in from future phase 2. I'm going to have a hardware store and likely a Domino's in front of the track here as the back part of a business strip, and will have a road crossing the tracks. I will likely either have a home across the tracks or an empty lot.


The main line makes up the back portion of the run-around. The industry here is a trailing point spur; ultimately both industries are trailing point spurs for the direction of travel, as this is where the local would typically switch directions to head back to the interchange. Industry wise, the back spur is perfect for a box plant, and so that's where I've moved it. The box plant spur in phase 2 will become the fertilizer dealer, much more like the one on Pickens' Honea Path branch (I'll likely add a second building and hopper spot like that one as well), and the fertilizer spur will end up as a plastics plant. This all lines up more with what the HP branch and others I've followed on Google Earth do. The box plant spur will hold 5 cars and is typically going to be 50' high cubes of paper, 50' normal heights for baled waste paper from the box cutting process, and an occasional tank car of glue for the flex-folder-gluers and folder-gluers in the plant and occasional starch hopper for use by the corrugated to make the glue that holds the layers of the corrugate together. Here, the spur is spotted up with 2 each high cube and regular 50' boxes and a tank car of glue. I've also seen 60' high cube boxcars to and from box plants here the last few years, I'm not sure if they're moving paper rolls or baled waste paper (or perhaps both!), but I have the cars to model this as well.


This is the tail end of the passing siding. Ideally this line goes to the further portion of the branch that's used for car storage (can build models of those kinds of cars as well), and in one of the versions of history I'm kicking around it could even be running to a propane dealer, but that is something I'm gonna have to check on if that area of the Carolinas is close enough to the Colonial Pipeline. There really aren't any rail served propane dealers in the Upstate, and I suspect it's because we're right on the Colonial Pipeline and there's no need, even though a lot of rural folks use tanked propane! For reference, the Blue Ridge Southern in Western North Carolina serves a distributor with cuts around a half dozen cars or so at a time.


And finally, the team track has been replaced with a lumber yard. This just seems like the quintessential shoreline industry, so I've included it. Drawn is a rough draft of a two lane road, so the lumber yard will require the engine to blow the horn while working it. There is space for two center beams. The industry will be worked by the locomotive running around the inbound train after having worked the box plant, and will either pull empties and then couple up to the rest of the train, or will run around, grab the inbound loads, then swap loads and empties.


As far as a team track goes, with the two lane road I could see having a gravel lot by the switch for the lumberyard and an occasional car spotted on the passing siding, which would get in the way of the run around. The run-around holds about 7 cars, but I see most trains being 5-6 (or being able to be 5-6 after working the box plant). There won't be any off-spot cars here, as the former passing siding in phase 2 is where those would be stored, like what the Carolina Piedmont does. Right now, my sessions will start with the train stopped at the box plant to work it and will end with the train together ready to leave. I can run the layout as-is but want to have a cassette set up for the phase 2 end. I also might be able to get the room completely re-arranged so I can start phase 2 as well! Ultimately, the full operating session would be the train coming from the interchange, storing off-spots and pulling older off-spots destined for the industries while blocking the train. The local will then work the plastics plant, likely ultimately pulling 1 or 2 (occasionally 3) cars. It will then run into town, with 1 or 2 cars for the box plant. Sometimes the train may be longer with more boxcars coming in if the plant is down to only 1 or 2 spotted.  There lumber yard and fertilizer plant may have an inbound or two, but likely either only one will be worked in a session, or 1 will be a pull and the other a spot. The occasional team track car can add even more complication if I want it, or I can just work one or two industries if I'm wanting to run something shorter. Additional variations can include the power either coming in light and only switching off-spots and cars at the industries, or stationed in town with part of a train.

Now, as to where in SC this will be. Right now, I'm thinking this is a proto-freelanced branch of Piedmont and Northern heritage. Originally the P&N wanted to connect its Greenwood-Spartanburg and Gastonia-Charlotte lines, but the Southern kept blocking it in court. In my mind, they then turned to competing on the Spartanburg-Asheville route with Saluda grade and built through Boiling Springs, SC, but ultimately failed either due to Southern in court again, not finding a route, or not being able to compete with Southern and failing due to the complexities of operating a line like the Saluda Grade (same part of the country as where I'm talking about). Ultimately, this railroad interchanges with CSX in Spartanburg, with the plastics plant and fertilizer being in the country between Spartanburg and Boiling Springs. In my brain the box plant and lumber yard are separate, with the box plant being on the Spartanburg side of Boiling Springs and the lumber yard being on the Asheville side, but I have them set up like this due to "compressing the protolanced area". The theoretical propane dealer would be in the lower Blue Ridge mountains around Green Creek and Mill Spring, North Carolina, or just across the border in SC, but I need to check A) how far from the Pipeline that is and B) could you theoretically have a railroad route from Boiling Springs to Green Creek NC?

[packers#1]

Finally finished wiring the layout up, and had my first ops session yesterday. This is a good switching layout as is, and this will be a great end of line turnaround once I get the second shelf and can add shuffling cars around and another couple industries. But first I need to clean the layout off and reorganize the room.

Switching the box plant here


And spotting a Centerbeam of lumber. The two empties were put at the end of the runaround to be tacked into the end of the train.