In case you get tired of “mountain” railroads

[jward]

Not sure what you mean by real tour. That is my Dad's layout. It is handlaid code 83 on the main and code 70 on the siding. I helped lay this track about 40 years ago and it's still in operation. Up until this virus thing he held operating sessions once a week. The layout is run just like the real thing, with timetable and train order rules. Under normal operations, the head end and helper locomotives have separate crews who must coordinate to get the train to the top of the mountain. Once there, the helper will cut off and duck into a pocket track to await another train. It will then return to the bottom of the mountain to meet the train it is to assist.

The railroad itself has 3 main terminals, with a central junction where all the lines converge and this introduces some interesting problems. Locomotives tend to accumulate where they are not needed, and excess power must be added to trains to get them where they are useful. That is the case with the 4 unit consist on the empty coal train. Another problem is that traffic tends to all converge on one spot at the same time, and the dispatcher has his hands full trying to get everything sorted out.

[Trainman203]

We hear about Horseshoe Curve and the Tehachapi Loop until we are blue in the face.  But no one ever talks about this, which is just as cool.  Probably because in the south there isn't a railfan every 10' like in the northeast or California.

https://thetunneldiaries.com/tag/hiwassee-loop/

[Terry Toenges]

I've been to the museum but I don't think we took the train ride. If I remember, we stopped there on the way to Florida one year and didn't spend a whole lot of time there. $42 for a coach ride and $93 for a dome ride.
https://www.tvrail.com/events-exhibits/rides/hiwassee-loop

[Trainman203]

The best thing about the Hiwassee Loop is that it looks like something on a layout! I remember seeing an American Flyer layout with track spiraling around and up a mountain, just like at Hiwassee!

[Trainman203]

The Great Smoky Mountain Railroad is a few miles to the east in North Carolina.  It has a steam engine about half the time and is less than half the cost.  But the scenery is half as exciting.  It's almost entire paralleling rivers down in valleys.

[jward]

East of Asheville in North Carolina are two railroads worthy of mention. The Southern headed west out of Old Fort up the Blue Ridge front through a series of loops and Horseshoe curves gaining about 1000 feet in elevation. The railroad loops around for seven miles in the space of about a mile and a half, and in some places three different levels of railroad are visible at once. There are seven tunnels on the way to the summit, one below the loops, and six above. There is one spot where you can stand with your back to one tunnel, look through a second and watching a train coming towards you out of a third.

Just a short distance to the northeast, Clinchfield climbed the same mountains using its own loops. They weren't as convoluted as SOuthern's, but they more than made up for it in the sheer number of tunnels, about 20, on the climb to the top.

But the most spectacular of all existed just north of the Southern where the narrow guage Mt Mitchell railroad climbed its namesake mountain on a sustained 5% grade through several sets of switchbacks. The railroad topped out at almost 6000 feet in elevavtion, about 3500 feet above its connection to the Southern near Black Mountain. Its terminus at Camp Alice was about 5700 feet above sea level.

[Terry Toenges]

I'd love to do that Hiwassee ride from the dome. With my health I doubt that I will ever do it. It's about 500 miles from me. Then, my small tanks of oxygen only last between 3 1/2 and 4 hours. That mean I'd have to take an extra tank or take one of my bigger tanks whch gives me about 6 to 6 1/2 hours. That is pretty heavy to carry so I'd probably have to use the rolling cart with it. If I took the rolling thing, they'd probably charge me an extra fare for the room that takes up. The they probably wouldn't let me up in the dome with that because I would have to walk the cart up the stairs. If they charged an extra fare, that would be $186 for a dome ride for me.
The moral of the story is: Don't smoke cigarettes and you won't have to miss out on a dome ride when you get old.

[OLDERTIMER]

 :-[Sorry to hear about that, Terry

Surprised that no one has mentioned mountain railroading in the Colorado Rockies.  (standard garage of course, Trainman!)  winter at near 12000 ft, broken rotary, frozen fingers and toes, gasping for breath at the high altitude,  road closed for nearly  80 days, thats REAL mountain railroading, and at rifle site notch on the D&SL there is both a tunnel and a trestle passing over it.  Paul G

[Trainman203]

Colorado Midland?  Yes, a seldom modeled road.  Colorado standard gauge.  They had two tunnels over their major pass, can't think of the name right now.  It was the shortest route west over the mountains but almost impossible  operationally.   It finally gave up early, 1920 maybe?  Someone correct me.  A stub called the Midland Terminal held on until after WW2 but it gave up too.  Great modeling subject almost never done, although some guy is doing a museum quality O Scale layout, I think I remember it in one of the magazines a few years ago.

[OLDERTIMER]

you're confusing railroads Trainman.  the Colorado Midland, thanks to the government, (USRA), closed down around 1920.  The RR i'm talking about is the Denver & Salt Lake., also known as the Denver Northwestern & Pacific, also known as the Moffat Road.  In 1928 the Moffat Tunnel was opened and the Hill Route was abandoned.  They continued on as the D&SL till 1947 when they were absorbed by the D&RG.  That brings up another long story as to whether the Rio Grande should have been renamed the D&SL.  Paul G

[Trainman203]

The way I heard it, the MP went broke trying to buy control of the Rio Grande.  Which put it into receivership until 1956 and is also why almost no MP steam engines were preserved.  So if things had worked out, the D&RGW would have been part of the Mopac.  Correct me as needed.  This is all stuff I remember from 101 years ago. 

[jward]

The way I heard it, the MP went broke trying to buy control of the Rio Grande.  Which put it into receivership until 1956 and is also why almost no MP steam engines were preserved.  So if things had worked out, the D&RGW would have been part of the Mopac.  Correct me as needed.  This is all stuff I remember from 101 years ago. 

Actually, Both the D&RGW and MoPac were part of George Gould's atempt to build a true transcontinental railroad. Other lines in this system were Western Pacific, Wabash, Wheeling & Lake Erie and Western Maryland. He went broke trying to build a link between the Wheeling & Lake Erie and the Western Maryland via Pittsburgh. The Wabash- Pittsburgh Terminal was built to extremely high, and expensive standards, and when he was unable to extend the line east of Pittsburgh, local traffic wasn't enough to sustain it. The Western Maryland had built a super railroad from CUmberland, MD west to Connellsville, Pa, and eventually in 1932 the W-PT successor P&WV was able to complete the link to COnnellsville from Pittsburgh. with all the logical routes between the two cities already taken by other railroads, they were forced to follow the ridge tops, jumping from ridge to ridge via huge trestles that earned the line the nickname "High & Dry." BY that time, of course, George Gould and his dreams of a transcontinental railroad were long gone. Ironically, the railroad that brought down an empire survives to-day, intact except for the last couple of miles into downtown Pittsburgh.

[Trainman203]

Thanks.  Good executive summary.

[Trainman203]

I did a little Wiki- search about the Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal and the whole George Gould transcontinental boondoggle, that seems to be the best description.  The whole scheme was 30 years too late, cobbling together existing lines and building tenuous connections to create a ill conceived larger system .  It's all very much like the B F Yoakum scheme around the same time to create parallel competition to the IC from Chicago to New Orleans with the Rock Island, the Gulf Coast Lines/Frisco et al.  The afterglow of the already ended golden era of railroads.

But the story of the Wabash Tunnel even today still a boondoggle, the Monongahela River bridge that killed 10 men in a collapse days before completion, which just stopped dead at a terminal with the train shed at least 100 feet above street level, a beautiful terminal station that was 20 years too late and should have never been built, the whole thing being a loser from the beginning and only lasting 40 years, man, it's a railroad soap opera on a par with the never-completed Grand Trunk in New England.

[jward]

That it is. It's a fascinating history. The Wabash Tunnel exists to-day as a HOV tunnel that begins and ends in inconvenient places so has never been fully utilized. But the rest of the story is that once the P&WV extended to Connellsville, it became an integral part of the Alphabet Route along with the Western Maryland and Nickle Plate. As late as the 1970s, there were 3 scheduled freights each way plus many extras.

A footnote is that because of the topography and the less than desirable route they were forced to use, the main yard in Pittsburgh was squeezed into the only usable spot they could find, with a tunnel on one end, and a 100 foot high bridge on the other.

Another equally fascinating story is that of the never completed South Penn from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg. Backed by the New York Central and prominent Pittsburgh industrialists as a way to break the PRR's effective monopoly on steel and coal traffic to the east coast. Pennsylvania's geography includes a band of parallel ridges that run counter to any cross state transportation corridor. PRR and B&O used river valleys to get through these ridges to the Allegheny Front, a mountain nobody could avoid. The South Penn, lacking such a route, tackled the ridges head on through a series of tunnels, several of which are still in use as part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.