L&N, CUMBERLAND VALLEY DIV. (LATER SUBDIV.)

[landnrailroader]

And then back to route building. The L&N entered the coal fields of Kentucky around 1890 and one of the first locations of this coal was around Manchester, KY. As late as 1995, there were several active mines there and at least one unit train loadout. It is more or less closed down and in one aerial in Google it appears that the rails have been cut just beyond this spot, so likely there will be no more. I am doing the simulation as it would have been between 1965 & 1995 approximately. Steam was gone and RS-3s were numerous. Mine runs out of Manchester were run through to Corbin, about 70 total miles. On the rest of the Cumberland Valley Div. (now a subdivision of the CSX Atlanta Div.) most mine runs worked out of Loyall, KY and trains were built there for Corbin. For many years US Steel had a group of mines around Benham. Since there is a payware route covering that, I have omitted it. In the image, we see most of the Manchester operation and as you can see there are a lot of mines here. Most are two or three track tipples but near the center bottom is where the unit trains were loaded. There was one of the ubiquitous batch loaders (or maybe a flood loader) at that spot. I'll borrow that item from the PRB route in the library.

Jerry Sullivan HORSE_CRK01.jpg

[geepster775]

That looks like the mine at Redbird, where the Oneida & Western mint green trainset loaded. I always thought that would be a cool trainset to have. The SD40s were copies of the L&N 3600/8000 series, the cabooses were copies of UP CA-11s, and the steel tubs were built by Youngstown.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/14904577@N23/pool/

https://www.american-rails.com/oneida.html

[landnrailroader]

I'll take a look in my several L&N books and see about that for sure, but I think the O&W train loaded on the Eastern Kentucky Div. (now a broken sub.) As information the EK sub., Cumberland Valley Div., Knoxville Div., and all lines north of Corbin to Cinncinati are now subdivisions of the Atlanta Div. of CSX. EK track has been cut west of Jackson, KY and no trains operate from there to Patio (Winchester). Any coal that comes from there comes east.

I finally found where the mine is supposed to be located but there is nothing there. It is said to be at 19485 Route 66, Beverly, KY. Well if you follow route 66 southwestward, you come to a large preparation plant etc. on route 66 at -83.5910/36.8921 and a little further along 66 there is a rusted out loadout and what may have been a mine entrance on the hillside to the north. In a number of locations trucks were used to move the raw coal to a processsing plant located on a rail line. This plant is at the extreme end of the Left Fork branch - off off the Straight Creek branch. The line I showed in the image runs off the main line of the Cumberland Valley at Heidrich, KY while the Straight Creek branch goes to the north also just east of Pineville or about 30 miles further east that this line. Now articles I found mentioned that some coal went east and to do that, the coal would have gone east on the CV main to Baxter and then south to Hagans switchback where it would connect with the original CV mainline and connect before 1980 with the Clinchfield line at St. Paul, VA, or after about 1980 with the Southern(NS) at Big Stone Gap and thence to the Clinchfield at Frisco, TN but apparently this routing did not work well and so the longer western route was used. The coal was bound for a steam plant in SC. I need to do the Left Fork, Straight Creek, and Scotia branches to complete this spider web. Scotia was only in use from 1963-1993 and there are no track charts for it. After 2 fatal explosions at the Scotia mine and other issues it was closed in 1993 and the branch was removed back to Cumberland, KY.

After further checking you are correct and on GE, the Shamrock facility was at -83.7664/37.1300. Data I found indicates that the mines were several miles to the northeast of Manchester and processed coal was trucked here. A lot of that is done in KY, sometimes to avoid using rail. I had a friend whose son-in-law had 2 of those really big multi-axel dump trucks and they called coal for a fee from near Jenkins, KY to a barge loader at Catlettsburg, which is over 100 miles and they did it every day.

Jerry

[geepster775]

The green train loaded at Redbird until the mid 80s when Redbird was finally played out, and then it moved over to loading at Clover on the Straight Creek. That also was a Shamrock property at the time.

The east leg of the wye at Heidrick was pulled up soon after the train no longer ran the Clinchfield routing. I guess the Clinchfield operating guys often wanted to combine this 72 car train with other trains, leave extra units behind at St Paul/Miller, and Shamrock didn't like that.

Just to the east of the loadout the twisting road that runs to the top of the hill is showing as Shamrock Rd in GE.

It was SouthEast Coal (SECX) that ran the green ex-UP GP20s on the EK. Most of their mines were below Hazard around Isom, and their private trainset hauled raw coal to the processing site just north of Ravenna, at Calla.

[landnrailroader]

Yes, I have all of my TRAINS issues back to my first one, January 1952 and in doing a search, I noticed that my friend Ron Flanary had a article on the train in the 4/2007 issue. Since that was buried behind my wife's toys after she annexed my model railroad room, I logged into my unlimited Trains account and read the article there. Apparently, the Clover complex was at the extreme east end of the Straight Creek branch. That extension is relatively recent, being from 1960 or later but it does not appear that there is active loadout there now. However about 1.5 mles south of Manchester there was still a unit train loading as late as 2022 which you can see in the 2022 aerials on GE. Now, as far as I know there is only 2 active loadouts on the CV. One is at Myrna off the Martin's Fork branch which connects Baxter, KY with Hagans switchback. I do this stuff mainly as a way to showcase history and others will probably go bananas working up activities. My plan is to provide a outline in the documents folder that gives the approx. times that this or that branch was active. I also have a employee timetable from back around 1985 and I will scan the relevant pages of that and include them.

Robert Vaugh had a website when I first started doing this hobby in 2001 but has not been updated since 1997 and probably does not exist now. But in it, he provided directions to nearly all existing and defunct coal loadouts in Eastern KY. He had a good explanation of the Redbird facility, of which a few structures still exist. YES IT DOES, GOOGLE W & H Main Yards and it comes right up.

Jerry Sullivan

[landnrailroader]

After the coal source for the Redbird mine near Manchester, KY began to dwindle, a new mine was opened at the extreme end of the Straight Creek branch. This was called the Clover Complex but it was not actually a mine. There was large areas of ground storage, and equipment to load the green train which was an early unit train by way of a silo with the track running through the bottom. This type of loadout is rare in Kentucky, there being only two that I ever heard of, both on lines of the Cumberland Valley. Most loadouts are either flood or batch loaders supplied by conveyor from a silo. We do not have a single silo in the library and while there may be some on payware routes, I don't go there, so the one seen in the image is from the freeware Powder River route. By the way, that is a accurate and well done route and if anyone is interested in "super detailing" it could be improved a lot. Most of the structures are basic blocks, oblongs, etc. but they beckon for more. At this point we are near milepost 223 (from Louisville, KY) on the Straight Fork branch. Ground images of this route on Google Earth after around 2000 show lots of growth on the track and rusty rails. None of the mines are active.

Jerry CLOVER_COMPLEX.jpg

[geepster775]

There is a railfan college kid with a youtube channel who lives in the area who keeps tabs on which mine loadouts are idle and which are reborn. Evidently his father works in the mines, which is how he did a mini-documentary from inside one of the mines. His community college access is how he edits many of his videos.

Nice video of inside Lynch 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOWxgzrXixs

Lynch 3 restoration, after years of sitting idle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzGPGy5_IZo

Derailment of engines at Lynch 3 during runaround move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUol1kAajgU

Cloverlick spur history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ms8QK1lGo

[landnrailroader]

Yes, I have included the spur and mine in the simulation. I was not aware of them shipping coal south to near Appalachia from here though, even if it was for a shortime. There is a mine on the Clover Fork (of Cumberland R.) branch east of Harlan that still ships by conveyor through the mountain to Benedict in Virginia which is a joint NS/CSX served complex although it is on the NS St. Charles line. I have included it in this route, although it is also in the Clinch-Appalachia route that I sent to Kenney Eaton a year or so ago. Because of that through the mountain thing, the Clover Fork branch ends now a few miles west of that mine but in this simulation, I took all the way to the original end. In the EK Div. route that I have most of the track laid for, I included all the original line as it existed after ending at McRoberts in 1912 though the last 10 miles was abandoned in 1950, and east of Blackey is now gone. The Rockhouse branch was built in the late 1940s, early 50s, and any coal mined around Hazard or east goes out to the former C&O that way now.

Jerry

[landnrailroader]

After completing the Straight Fork branch, i.e. what the railroad often refers to as the Right Fork, but it is of Straight Creek, I have started working up the Left Fork. Near mile 211 there is now the remains of what was once a fairly high producing coal mine. It had a more modern type of single track loader though not as fancy as this one from the PRB and before that, there was another mine here that had a multiple track tipple. I don't know what the more recent location was called, but the 1949 track chart calls it Bell Coal Co., so I will use that. The offset for the loader consists of 120r10d curve pieces with a 30m straight between them. Otherwise the siding uses M-track spacing with a 7 degree curve behind the cameral and a 3 degree curve ahead. The siding extends for slightly more than a mile but since the loadout is close to one end, my gut feeling is that the siding was extended, perhaps sometime after this location shutdown, to better handle trains from the remaining location at the extreme end of the branch which may have still been active in 2024.

Jerry bell_coal.jpg

[landnrailroader]

After completing the Right Fork branch, I added in the roughly 12 mile Scotia branch. As I have no track charts or other data for this one, it was a bit tricky but by using the oldest images in GE, from 1995, in some cases the track was still existing and though blurred, I could see the rough center. This branch was built in the 1960s to serve a new mine and abandoned in the 1990s after the mine closed. Some reverence required here. The infamous Scotia mine exploded in the early 70s taking several good men with it and then a few days later when a rescue team was in the mine, it exploded again. In all more than 20 good men lost their lives. After other difficulties, mainly roof falls, unstable rock, etc. the mine closed around 1990 for good. At it's peak it went nearly 5 miles underground extending quite a ways into Virginia. BlueGrass Resources has a very active mine near Cumberland which is included in the route. The loadout is at the site of Lynch #2 which when it was active was the only mine in Kentucky to use a silo with the loadout in the bottom, a type that is common on the Powder River. After being dormant for some years the mine reopened with a new loadout and refurbished Prep plant. Unlike many mines, the actual mines are at a distance of a mile or two from the Prep plant and there are three. Panther, located a couple miles further up the holler, Tyree located across the tracks and main road from the Prep Plant and another I haven't found yet that was recently opened as a new mine. Check out RailfanMicah on YouTube - he has a number of good videos on this and other operations. Interestingly, large trucks bring the raw coal from the mine to the Prep plant and then some finished coal is trucked several miles (by road, in a straight line about 10) to another BR loadout near St. Charles, VA which, being jointly served by CSX & NS is also in this simulation. So now I have turned my attention back to the Northern Montana line. I intend to release that one as a operational route but needing "super-detailing" except at Great Falls and Harlowton. There are no signals except APB on the Milwaukee mainline through Harlowton and on some BN lines around Great Falls. I will try to place mileposts but I have not yet figured out how to place things that are track connected. In any case I do have markers for the mileposts. Like wise gantry objects like fences.