McKee Hollow

[landnrailroader]

Before 1963, a favorite railfan site, if you knew how to get to it, was McKee Hollow viaduct on the old CNO&TP line up Sloans valley. My friend, Ron Flanary created a fine painting of the Royal Palm charging up grade (1.1%) behind a magnficent PS-4 and this image appeared in TRAINS some years back. So here is my rendering of it. I prefer to use the bridge rails on viaducts and in this case the viaduct is about 60 feet longer than prototype because there is no bridge end rail for curved track and the southmost part of the bridge is on a 500R10D curve. I will need to adjust the terrain a bit, but that comes later. In the distance is the north most viaduct and there is one more to the south. There were several tunnels with one very short one being daylighted a long time ago and the rest eliminated by the new line a few miles to the west, in 1963.

Jerry Sullivan McKEE_HOLLOW.jpg

[jbtower]

Good to see your route progress Jerry and Ron Flanery is a priceless source of information anything related to Southern!

[eric]

This is a standalone bridge-end (just the center rails coming to a point) that should match up with the replacement A1T tracks.

You should be able to drop and drag this along the tracks if "stick to target" is applied.

Zip ---> bridge-end-1.zip

Perhaps those Sloan's were from my wife's clan in Eastern KY.... the spelling ranged from Sloane to Sloan and Slone depending on which side of which ridge you were on...

[landnrailroader]

Ron is a great source of SR information, but an even greater source of L&N information. As a child and teen, his grandparents lived near Loyall, KY and he has mentioned his escapades in that area several times. He is also an accomplished trumpeter with a local band in the Big Stone Gap area. And he is a past president of the L&N Historical Soc. and still quite active there. Southern in the 1970s was a difficult place to work. I burnt out by 1978 and took a position with the FRA. It was SR first, family last or get off the property, we don't need you. The culture at Chessie System was very different although we had one guy that was more or less in charge of signal design and he despised the idea of using a CADD system, which I was hired to manage. But God was on my side. A former music director at my old church in Alexandria, VA was also a high ranking military officer. He knew that I had plans for some custom Hi-Fi speakers and he had lost his set. One day my phone rings and this character grabs his phone and answers it -- he suddenly looked like he was having a stroke and comes to my desk almost to tip toes and said "You have a call from the PENTAGON". Well it was just General Hottel asking if I could send a copy of the plans to him. But as I picked up my phone, I told the A-hole that he must quietly leave my office because this was probably a matter of national security and if he knew anything about it, then a contract would be put on him. Several years later, after we came to Florida, my real boss asked me what had happened that day and I told him. He said that was good because he never had any more trouble with the A-hole. Neither did I. General Hottel retired from the army a few years later and became pastor of a church in WoodBridge, VA. I last heard from him a decade ago and he is still alive he would be 100 or so.

Jerry

[landnrailroader]

That bridge has over 6,000 polys and I did it as one object. Usually I limit these to about 4500 polys but someone posted an answer to my question about that relative to ORTS and TSRE and said that limit didn't apply. One of my future projects is the JOSO bridge over the Snake River and it would be really big. Since all but the southern 300 feet or so is tangent, I probably will use sections but I wonder if anyone knows what the limitation would be. If those programs are set up for 64bit systems, then the poly count could go into the millions.

Jerry

[landnrailroader]

Thanks Eric, I installed it and used it. Now the viaduct is the correct length.

Jerry