Quinnimont, WV

Funny name, interesting location:

Quinnimont (which comes from Latin, meaning "Five Mountains") was formed around an iron furnace on an unusually large (for the New River Gorge) area of flat bottom land. The furnace didn't last, but coal traffic did.

To the railroad, this is an important point as it's where the Laurel Creek branch meets the mainlines and not far from the Piney Creek branch at Prince. In addition, there is a small yard to handle the traffic from these branches.

Enough with the historic mumbo jumbo, I know you're dying for some pictures...

Below is an overall view of the newest addition so far:



I designed it to interface with the Prince segment via a small "filler" segment that can be replaced with another filler to suit the space available. For the 10 foot wide section of basement that the layout is in, a 18" filler is used, as shown below.



From there, the mains (and yard) curves along the river, then splits off into the wye. You can see my notations written on the subroadbed denoting which lines are the mainlines (westbound and eastbound).



Inside the wye will be the passenger station, express building, boiler/sand house, and a few other structures (including the ruins of the iron furnace). Here I'm plotting approximate locations of some of these using drawings copied to scale.



Towards the opposite end of the wye, you can see the gap cut for Laurel Creek, as well as the trackwork diverging out into the "new yard" (at left in this pic) and to the wye and engine service area at right. (The two straight parallel tracks are the engine servicing area). The two nearest turnouts in this pic will be on the mainlines.



And last but not least... just beyond the creek will be the iconic QN Cabin (still in the box).



Beyond that will be the "old yard" which is between the two mainlines as opposed to on one side... this presents some operational challenges, but that's part of the appeal of modeling this area.

Until next time....

Just a tease...

Exciting times... I'm almost ready to start building the wye area at Quinnimont.

Tech: under-layout wiring, switch motors, & switch controls.

Yeah, it's been a while. I've been messing with other projects lately and the layout has been neglected. This weekend I went back to it and finished wiring up the Prince segment and thought I'd share some of the electrical work involved.

Due to prior positive experiences with Circuitron Tortoise switch machines, I chose to use them on this layout. Yes, I'm sure there are cheaper options than a Tortoise... but they work well, seem reliable, and are versatile. They can drive more than one turnout and they have a built-in DPDT switch to handle frog power for the Atlas C55 track. Circuitron makes a remote mount kit that when paired with an extra cable and actuator will operate two switches with one motor (such as for a crossover).

A switch motor is useless without a way of controlling it. I wanted to have the option for both local control via a fascia-mounted pushbutton and to allow for remote operation either via handheld throttle or by a dispatcher using a CTC panel or comparable computer interface. With this, the list of options gets pretty slim. I am using the Digitrax DS64 for the task.

The 3'x16' Prince WV segment has a total of 11 track switches, 8 of which are arranged as crossovers. That means 4 crossovers and 3 other switches for a total of 7 Tortoises and two DS64s in this segment. Each Tortoise has a PCB sticking out with 8 solder pads. Two to drive the unit and the other six are the DPDT switch that is thrown as the motor drives the turnout. For a crossover, all 8 terminals are used. When you start adding in feeders (for blocks, since I've planned ahead for detection and signaling), bus wires, frog power wires, and ancillary things like the pushbuttons on the fascia and LocoNet wiring, it adds up. There's a lot of wire under this layout and more is to come. Fortunately, some spiral wrap helps a lot as you see below.

The big wire at the back is 12 gauge stranded for bus wire. Green wires are frog feeders and red and black are usually track power. These are 22 gauge solid. The yellow and orange pair you see above goes to one of the pushbuttons on the fascia, they're peeled off the 4-conductor ribbon packaged by Model Power. The other two (red and brown) feed power to the Tortoise motor.

Below is the DS64 and its wiring:

Loconet cable on the DS64 is not currently connected - I'm using track power for both power and data to the DS64 for now. The six-space terminal block next to it is for block feeders. The side with no wires in this photo will be connected to a detection circuit in the future, but for now I've tied all blocks into the main bus wire at the back edge of the layout.

More to come later on the DCC system and the plan for power management as well as the plan and construction of Quinnimont.

Another LDE...

Prince, WV

Another landmark location on the C&O is Prince, WV. Its starkly modern station stands in contrast to the remote landscape of the New River gorge. It may seem odd to have a station of such significance in such a locale, but it also served as the connection to the outside world for several sizeable towns up the Piney Creek branch including Beckley.

In modeling the location, I wanted to include the east portal of Stretcher's Neck Tunnel (which provides a convenient way to make the mainlines disappear), the junction with the branch at NI Cabin, and the station as it would have appeared in the 1950s. Little has changed around Prince since then. In the 1970s the mainline west of the Piney Creek branch junction was single-tracked, and now Amtrak's Cardinal stops at the station a few times a week instead of early streamliners in blue and yellow several times a day. Coal is still king here. Below, see my diagram of the track plan.

There is actually an error in my diagram - the crossover closest to the station is actually east (right) of the station.

With my newfound space in the basement, I built a 16 foot by 3 foot segment to represent everything from Stretcher's Neck to the west yard ladder near Quinnimont. The photo below shows the benchwork. The near end is Prince, the far end is where the Quinnimont yard ladder will be.

Below is a view from the west end of this segment. The track in the immediate foreground is the Piney Creek branch, the mainlines curve off to the left and will enter Stretcher's Neck tunnel at the edge of this LDE. A bit further up, you see the junction at NI Cabin between the mainlines and branch (currently represented by a photocopy of a drawing). Just past that on the left side of the mainlines is where Prince station will be.

Moving east just past the station, you can see the end of the second crossover in this construction pic below. The branch becomes the yard lead, then it and the mainlines snake through an S-curve before rounding the bend at the yard ladder as it curves towards Quinnimont. On the fascia you can see the control panel I made for the yard ladder.

Below is the yard ladder. It's wired up, operational, and as you see I've been "playing". :)

Last, a quick diagram of this segment. Red is the Prince station, blue is NI Cabin.

Planning (and building) some LDEs

CW Cabin at Hinton, WV

When I first came to the Atlanta area, I stumbled across an Alkem Scale Models kit for the C&O standard brick cabin and bought it since that's what stood at the west end of Hinton, WV. I figured I'd throw together a diorama / LDE with the crossovers at the west end of the yard. I pored over period photos of the location (fortunately, for modeling the C&O such photos are easy to find thanks to the C&O Historical Society and its publications) and came up with the design seen below.

Left is west, right is east. The track nearest the tower (top, in this image) is the yard lead - yard would be off to the right. The other two are the mainlines.

I started building the benchwork for this segment in early 2010 and soon had some track down as you see below. I was still in a small apartment in Atlanta, so it didn't get much beyond that at the time.

Since moving to Woodstock, I have a modest basement for the layout. Below is the current location of the CW Cabin segment, wired up and ready to be integrated into the layout once I reach the point of tying it into the rest.

Introduction

I'm modeling portions of the C&O Hinton Division in N scale, starting with the mainline between Hinton, WV and Prince, WV. The era is the 1950s - steam was still present but fading fast with first generation diesels having a firm grip on Chessie's road.

This blog will document the progress of construction and eventually operating sessions.

It all started nearly 17 years ago on a trip to Hinton, WV to visit some relatives. I was intrigued by the area and the fact that my great-grandfather was a carpenter for the C&O there at Hinton. Being a budding model railroader new to N-scale, I decided to model this line. I drew up a track plan for a very small layout and bought an Arnold S2 painted for the C&O. The layout was just a switching toy and didn't last. Eventually I built a larger switching layout. Neither of these two were very prototypical. After participating in operating sessions at several large layouts, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do - and it was going to need some space.

A while back I knocked together a 6' long Layout Design Element based on the crossovers at CW Cabin (west end of Hinton yard) as a taste of what was to come. Finally just a year ago I moved to a rented townhouse that had a modest but very useable basement and some real construction began. Since this is still not a permanent location, I've been building in segments around the concept of Layout Design Elements. While not truly modular, these segments are designed to be disassembled readily and re-assembled elsewhere with relative ease (as opposed to destroying and rebuilding an entire layout).

Recent work has been in the construction of the segment including Prince, WV and the mainline up to the west yard ladder at Quinnimont. Next up will be Quinnimont itself and the east yard, followed by some shopping for a larger basement so I can fill in between there and Hinton before doing further work on the branch lines.