Operating Layouts.

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Choo Choo City Rails Operating Descriptions

Bill Orman's MLS&T - Fri May 31, 7pm - 10pm

The MLS&T is a HO freelanced, present day railroad, depicting the Tennessee and Southern Kentucky landscape. Trains originate and return to Memphis, TN and Meridian, MS (hidden staging) using a shared NS/CSX mainline arriving in New Holland yard for distribution to several major industries. The layout is primarily a switching layout with 128 feet of mainline, a branchline (Tucker) providing five industries to serve, and Seeburg-Simmons industrial park on a peninsula.

Major industries served are an auto plant car loading facility, an auto transload facility to car carrier trucks, auto parts suppliers and JIT warehousing, as well as, a container/transload yard for container traffic and various tank cars. Additional traffic includes a coal fired power plant, salvage company, cement plant and flour mill providing a broad array of traffic on the railroad.

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Roy Masterson's Louisville Southern  - Thu May 30, 7pm - 10pm and Sun June 2,10am - 1 pm

The HO scale Louisville Southern was built for operations and is a point-to-point layout set in the late 1960's.  The LS operates from Harriman, Tennessee to Decatur, Alabama and motive power consists of Southern, L&N and Tennessee Central.  Major towns on the LS are Rockwood, Chattanooga, Bridgeport, Scottsboro and Huntsville. 

The layout has a 230' mainline on two levels in three rooms in the basement.  To get between the levels there is a double track helix with a radius of 35 1/2 on the outside track and 33 1/2 on the inside track.  The Dispatcher sits inside the helix but has his own switcher and is responsible for switching the town of Scottsboro on top of the helix and interchanging with east and westbound trains along with his other duties.  NCE throttles are used as well as Decoder Pro with a wireless router allowing various Smart Phone devices to run the trains.

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Jerry Holmes's Alleghany Sub - Fri May 31, 7pm - 10pm

The Alleghany Sub was, (and still is), principally a coal hauling, class 1 line, requiring the heaviest of motive power with pushers to move long strings of loaded hoppers east over the Alleghany summit. It is an 80 mile run from the marshalling yards at Hinton, W. VA:. to the classification yards at Clifton Forge, VA. The coal was usually moved,· during this period, by a pair of huge, 2-6-6-6, H-8 Allegheny type, articulated steam locomotives, one in front, one in the rear.

Premium passenger service was also high on C & O's list of.priorities in those days with many trains such as the George Washington and the Sportsman running daily over ~he line between Washington, D.C. and Chicago. These trains usuall made stops and drops at the mountain resort town of White Sulpher Springs, site of the famous Greenbriar Hotel.

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Knoxville Area Model Railroaders' (KAMR) Knoxville, Atlanta, and Mobile Railroad (KAMR) - Sun 6/2/19,  1:30pm to 4:30pm

Loosely based on the Southern Railroad, the Knoxville, Atlanta, and Mobile Railroad is a subsidiary of the Southern and uses a lot of Southern equipment - similar to the NC&StL and the L&N.  Great liberties are taken with both history and geography, while modeling the mainline from Cincinnati to Chattanooga and including the classification yard and passenger station in Knoxville.  The KAMR also interchanges with an independent short line – the Raccoon Creek Short Line which has a secondary yard - as well as a 3 ft narrow gauge railroad – the Bald Mountain Lumber and Mining RR, which for some strange reason uses western narrow gauge power.

The layout itself is a folded dog-bone design with a single staging yard off one of the nodes.  This arrangement allows continuous running for open houses, but for operation the dog-bone is ‘unzipped’, with the staging yard representing both Cincinnati and Chattanooga (which can be a little confusing at first). There is one main yard at Knoxville and the secondary yard of the Raccoon Creek short line.   DCC system is Digitrax plug-in, both simplex and duplex radio.  Communication method is ‘shout and holler’.  Car movement uses car cards and four position waybills. Seven operating positions are available: Knoxville freight yard, Knoxville passenger terminal,  Raccoon Creek/narrow gauge operator, and four standard gauge road crews.  A typical operating session runs 25 to 27 trains, depending on the traffic.  

The 30 by 40 ft. layout room is located within the west wing of the Children's Museum in Oak Ridge, approximately 2 hrs northeast of the convention hotel.  An N scale layout will be operating in the same building at the same time.   http://www.knoxmodelrailroaders.com/

461 West Outer Drive
Oak Ridge, TN 37830

865.482.1074

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Knoxville Area Model Railroaders (KAMR) N-Scale Division Layout - Sun 6/2/19,  1:30pm to 4:30pm

This layout consists of a number of old Ntrk modules now permanently installed with a classification yard and six arrival and departure tracks. There is an east and west main that run around the entire layout with industries off each main. The layout can be run in one of two modes – display or looping mode for our public days and operation mode.

When operating, a car card system is used. Trains will leave and return to the arrival and departuretracks in a point to point fashion. For example a train will leave the A/D tracks to the east main switching the industries off the east main and when the work is done the train will go back from whence it came. The layout has 5 major industrial areas with a total of about 30 businesses to switch. These industrial areas include a new peninsula called Malfunction Junction that has add more switching options.

The layout is wired for DCC using Digitrax equipment. There are many plug-in face plates around the layout and simplex or duplex wireless throttles can be used. In addition, smart phones and tablets running the Apple and Android throttles apps may be used. Typically two trains of about 6 cars are run on each of the two mains requiring 4 engineers. Since the layout can be accessed from both sides, it is often useful to have two conductors to assist the engineers from the other side of a module. Two engineers can be assigned to Malfunction Junction. Also a yard master and an assistant is needed to classify trains that have returned from a run and to build new trains.

Located at Children's Museum of Oak Ridge

461 West Outer Drive
Oak Ridge, TN 37830

865.482.1074

http://childrensmuseumofoakridge.org/exhibits-museum-map/