Work on the waybill boxes is progressing. With the pending completion of our new classification yard, we are in the process of converting our operations to a system based on car cards and waybills. In order to facilitate this, all locations where cars will be spotted will need waybill boxes installed on the fascia.
We have a simple way of making our boxes. The front and backs faces are countertop laminate material. The sides and bottoms are made of pine lattice stips. These strips are avialable pre-milled at the local home improvement store, so this eliminates a lot of cutting and ripping to size on the table saw. We use the lattice strips full width for boxes that will have to hold lots of cards such as classification yard tracks and staging yard tracks. We rip the strips lengthwise to make boxes that are thinner when they would only have to hold 5-6 cards maximum. For most industries, the thinner box is enough.
Blufton is the first station south of Elkhorn City on the Clinchfield. It is a small town with just a passing siding, station, and two spur tracks surving the local industries.
The Blufton freight house shown below sometimes sees some action on opeations night. A box car with supplies for the area mines would be the usual freight. Unfortunately the Blufton freighthouse dock track also serves as a passing siding, so the dispatcher does not like to have cars spotted at the dock for very long. The next passing siding is several miles down the line.
You can see here that a narrow gauge track from a nearby mine head extends directly into town.
The Blufton passenger station however sees plenty of action each operating session. Two passenger trains make stops here each day, one Northbound and one Southbound. The passenger platform always seems to have passengers waiting for the next train. (Could it be because these people are plastic and are frozen in place…)
Elkhorn City on our layout is the northern terminal of the Clinchfield RR and its interchange with the C&O. Only passengers really have Elkhorn City as a destination, and not many of them. All freight traffice moving northbound is just passing through Elkhorn City as there is really not much industry in the town other than a coal tipple which generates a few carloads. Most cars entering the yard are moving on to other locations.
Ekhorn Yard is a busy place however. All trains arriving here have to change power and crews as we are switching railroads. So the yardmaster has lots to do in receiving inbound trains from both railroads, switching power, and getting crews lined up for the outbounds. Most of the coal needed at the Ashland, kY steel mill comes off the Clinchfield. A couple of times a day, a redball reefer train from Florida arrives on the Clinchfield and is quickly processed through the yard with C&O power and sent on it’s way to Chicago.
You can’t even hear the junk yard dog barking when two trains are passing Sanford Scrap Metal. Sanford’s lot was dirt cheap as it is sandwiched between the two C&O mainlines and an access road to boot. But it don’t matter, the old man is half deaf anyway and the gondola spotted at his siding means he pays next to nothing to send his scrap to the nearby Ashland Steel furnaces.
On the West end of Ashland, KY, sits the small family owned business, the Lucas Fence Company. This business doesn’t see a lot of rail activity, just a boxcar of bulk chain link rolls roughly once a month or so. Apparently they just received a delivery that Mr. Lucas has yet to move from the loading dock to the warehouse.
Cars for this industry and others in the area are worked by the Ashland Yard switcher which has lots of other work in the area daily. The switch crew makes a run to the West end when necessary.
