Just Some Real-Life Pictures

Well, I am back after a few days of working on a new beer-brewing blog, but I have been working on the railroad a lot too. I am busy carving pink foam into ridges and mountains, and have drawn most of the main line track plan onto the tables.

The picture is of those MP15s that work the real-life CTC branch in Chattanooga, trundling through Red Bank. Here's another one of them crossing Tenbridge:



And finally, here's a little mishap that happened with a CTC train in Red Bank, and which I am sure I'll be repeating:




If you want something done, put a bunch of 12-year-old boys onto it. My son and two of his friends stopped at the pink-foam Dumpster with my wife yesterday and brought me back a ton of it! Yesssss!

I have not taken pictures of the recent progress yet, but will get them up ASAP. Right now I am going to quit, since I've been on this laptop long enough on this Saturday morning and my eyes hurt.

My Industries (all 10 of them)

I suppose I could add more, but this is what fits comfortably, and I didn't want a layout so crammed that it didn't have a realistic feel. Two team tracks will add to the freight destinations, and I could add a little freight house or fuel supplier near the interchange yard.

Notably absent from this CTC layout is a notable traffic generator, the DuPont Chemical plant in Hixson. In real life it attaches to the CTC right at the junction with NS. It was just too big to cram in. I suppose I could add it somehow as an "off-layout" industry; we'll give that some thought. Airco Gases is also right there. I should really try to work in one of these two ...



So here's the confirmed stuff. The rail traffic percentages are pretty much a product of my imagination, based on some basic logic and research:

GEO Specialty Chemicals
Intake:
• 40% Sulfuric acid in tankers
• 60% coal ash in 3-bay hoppers
Output:
• empty tankers
• empty hoppers

Ergon Terminaling
Intake:
• 70% empty tankers
• 15% empty gondolas
• 15% empty hoppers
Output:
• chemicals, asphalt and fuel in tankers
• gravel, sand in hoppers and gondolas

Signal Mountain Cement
Intake:
• 60% empty 2-bay hoppers
• 20% empty boxcars
• 10% 2-bay hoppers of fly ash
• 10% hoppers of coal
Output:
• ready-mix concrete in hoppers
• bagged ready-mix concrete in box cars
• empty 2-bay hoppers
• empty coal hoppers

Commercial Metals Co.
Intake:
• 100% gondolas of scrap
Output:
• empty gondolas

Colco Commercial Furniture Co.
Intake:
• 60% 3-bay hoppers of plastic pellets
• 15% coil cars of rolled steel
• 20% empty boxcars
• 5% empty gondolas
Output:
• empty hoppers
• empty coil cars
• boxcars of furniture
• occasional gondola of scrap

Chattanooga Brick and Tile Co.
Intake:
• 100% flatcars of brick, pipe and block
Output:
• empty flatcars


Little Katie Baking Inc.
Intake:
• 40% 2-bay hoppers of flour
• 30% tankers of corn syrup and oil
• 10% boxcars of other
• 10% reefers of fruit
Output:
• empty 2-bay hoppers
• empty tankers
• empty boxcars
• empty reefers

Rock-Tenn Co.
Intake:
• 100% empty boxcars
Output:
• boxcars of collected paper fiber for recycling

Dixie Flour Co.
Intake:
• 80% 3-bay hoppers of grain
• 10% empty box cars
• 10% empty 2-bay hoppers
Output:
• empty 3-bay hoppers
• occasional box car of bagged flour
• occasional 2-bay hopper of flour

A few of these haven't been discussed yet: Little Katie Baking is a tribute to my eponymous daughter (now 16 and a musician along with being a devout consumer of snacks). Colco Furniture is a tribute to my son Colin, who needed his own industry. Why is it office furniture? Can't tell ya. I wanted to drag around coil cars and plastic pellet hoppers.

Chattanooga Brick & Tile is a business I used to drive by every day going to and from work. It's right along Dayton Boulevard in Red Bank and an easy industry to model.

Dixie Flour is fictional, and based on a big flour mill here in Roanoke, Va. I figured it would be nice to have an industry that I could make some actual field trips to model. Chattanooga's a little too long a drive.

GEO Specialty Chemicals makes aluminum sulfate for use in the Moccasin Bend Water Treatment Plant. Its reactor uses sulfuric acid and fly ash (coal ash), and the facility is surrounded by a few settling ponds.

Authentic industries

How to pick industries? You can just browse through the hobby store or Web site, picking up pre-made ones like Walthers' Red Wing Milling, Interstate Fuel and Oil and Mew River Coal, etc. etc. There are a lot of great ones out there, if you're willing to settle for off-the-rack.

But what if you really want something authentic and realistic, that reflects modern day rail traffic (some of which can seem sort of mysterious with all these unmarked cars and chemical names)?

I had a really good time doing this. After closely examining my prototype route, I called up the Chattanooga GIS site and started researching the industries that looked interesting and small enough to model with some degree of realism.

Most GIS mapping systems (check out the one for your city or county) have features that let you click on a property and pull up the tax info. This will usually give you a name, sometimes rather cryptic, but enough for a Web search.

One industry I'll be modeling is Ergon Terminaling. A search of this name pulled up a slick, Flash-produced site with a full description of what the company does and where and how, and from this it was easy to extrapolate the kind of rail traffic it would produce. There was even a great aerial shot of the Chattanooga terminal, although I see the site has changed in the few weeks since I looked. Look at the site here.

The following image is from the Chattanooga GIS site, and shows part of the CTC that will be generating freight traffic on my layout. The area is in actuality known as Moccasin Bend:



Signal Mountain Cement is highlighted at the top, at one of the extreme ends of the line, and highlighted at the bottom is the area along the river where Ergon Terminaling and a barge-loading facility for Commercial Metals (a scrap recyler) are located. Clicking on these parcels on the GIS site brought up the ownership information and kicked off the research.

Now here's a close-up of the Ergon/Commercial Metals areas:



Note the branchline proper, over on the right hugging the hillside. My Ergon and Commercial Metals will be much abbreviated, of course, but you can see how incredibly useful this information is when building models. Just to the south of this area is the little GEO Specialty Chemicals plant, which produces aluminum sulfate for the nearby Moccasin Bend wastewater treatment plant. I'll be modeling this as well.

Next post will be about the industries I have chosen to model.

The real thing, in Hamilton County, Tenn.

The big honking image above (click on it for the full-size view) is a capture from Google Earth showing the actual CTC route all the way from the current NS line down to the Tennessee River in North Chattanooga. The route is currently served by a pair of EMD MP15 switchers that spend the night in the Manufacturers Road area and run freight out to the NS main line, over Tenbridge and into DeButts Yard. Here is a picture of the paired switchers pulling a consist across Tenbridge:



The image above is from railpictures.net, an incredible, searchable database. You can search by state, roadname, locomotive model, you name it.
Obviously, you would need an empty Wal-Mart building to model this to scale. So I have condensed it in every possible way. Capture the flavor; that's all you can hope to do.
The Web makes model railroad planning a joy. You can use Google Earth and Google Maps to look at your routes in detail, and then use county and city GIS sites to plan your industries. I'll discuss this later.