Operation on the my Clinchfield Railroad

I model the Clinchfield Railroad in the summer of '76 -'77 when the colors in the Appalachian Mountains are beautiful. Clinchfield Railroad is now part of the CSX Corporation. I have a spare room that measures 12' x 12' with an around the wall layout and a peninsula in the middle. I have two staging yards to stage trains when I run an operating session. One representing Erwin, TN and the other on the north end representing Elkhorn City, KY.

I model the Clinchfield in HO scale with the primary yard being Kingsport, TN with two major industries. One of the industries is Tennessee Eastman. Tennessee Eastman is a major part of Kingsport, TE has over 35 miles of rail alone. The other industry is Mead Paper, you guessed it, they make paper!

I've tried to capture the north end of the CRR as much as possible with a mixture of coal and merchandise. Some of the other industries include Metro Gas, Penn-Dixie Cement & Gravel, McClure Lumber, Kingsport Freight Terminal, and Feldspar Corporation. I've modeled the Fremont Branch on a small scale, with two tipples; Mullins, Victor, and of course Moss # 1 mine at the end. Haysi is part of the staging yard in Elkhorn, where I run the Greenbriar turn.

I model one mainline tipple which is Honey Branch. The session takes about 4 hours with a 3:1 ratio clock, which means an 12 hour work day in real life. Due to limited space I run the layout as prototypical as possible. My future plans are to model Kingsport to a "T" and to model a bigger portion of Eastman and Mead. As well as a small portion of Dante to handle all of the coal sorting and turns in and out of Dante Yard.

I hope you enjoy the pictures and check out my Clinchfield Country web site sometime in the near future.