N&W Pocahontas Main, WV track plan O

• Size: 13′ x 46 ′
• Scale: O
• Minimum Radius: 56″ 
• Minimum Aisle Width: 36″
• Designed by Dan Bourque

The N&W’s Pocahontas Division Mainline was the heart of the N&W. The double-track main cut through the mountains of the West Virginia coal fields with branch lines of various sizes plying the hollers and feeding an endless string of coal hoppers to the main. As the N&W’s main east-west artery, the “Pokey” main also hosted numerous non-coal freights and the N&W’s hottest passenger trains. Add in dozens of tunnels and bridges, small mountain towns and some company towns, and you’ve got the makings of a great model railroad in any scale.

The Layout

The desire for this track plan was to support primarily steam-era mainline running with passenger trains and freights with a little mine-run work on the side.  This is only the third track plan I’ve created in O scale and the first that captures a mainline rather than a branch. O scale offers an amazing level of detail, but it also takes up a ton of space. The long and narrow space I had to work with here would be enough for an empire in HO, but I quickly found that with a 56″ minimum radius restriction for the running of N&W 2-8-8-2 Mallets, I couldn’t even create a folded dog bone design without the aisles being too narrow. I settled on a twice-around-the-room design centered on the mainline near Davy, West Virginia which had a good combination of small town, tunnels, bridges, and coal operations.

The basic design has a loop of double-track main on the top loop and a double-ended staging yard on the bottom loop with a swing-out section for easy access to the main aisle. I also had to work around a utility area, but it conveniently had about 16″ of space along the wall for tracks which I took advantage of. The mainline captures 5 tunnels and two deck-girder bridges along with a short run-around track and two short branches to medium-sized tipples at Marytown and Asco. Even though I selected a short section of mainline, there is still a lot of selective compression and some compromise. First, I eliminated 2 of the 4 bridges and 1 tunnel in this section of track to avoid making everything too crowded. Also, the branch to Davy comes off the main from the opposite direction before curving around the hillside–I didn’t have room for this, so I switched the switch orientation which doesn’t really affect the operations much. The scene at Marytown may look contrived with the main on one side of the river, a tipple on the other, a conveyor over the main and a tunnel in a tight space, but it’s actually prototypical–you can see a picture of this scene here. In reality, the branch continued up the Tug Fork river from this scene and reconnected with the main at Twin Branch, a town between Marytown and Davy I chose to eliminate to simplify the plan.

Davy was a small town with a little L-shaped downtown area that cut across the N&W main. I’ve included one half of the L (the other is “in the aisle”) to allow for some small downtown buildings and a few houses. The branch up to Asco runs along the wall in this section and pops out along the wall in the entryway. This scene includes a portion of a company town and the Asco tipple which would make a great scratchbuilding project. On the opposite side of the entryway is the swing out–this is the only area of the layout where trains go through a single scene twice, but it adds a mainline scene between two tunnels on the entryway side, and it keeps both sets of tracks visible on the swing-out. The swing-out is long (and probably heavy), so legs with casters would help. When open, the swing-out leaves a 36″ wide aisle which can be made even wider by removing the swing-out section if anything in the utility area needs replacing.

The staging level is reached by 2-percent grades in the visible sections and in the utility area where the upper and lower loops cross. There’s enough room under Davy to fit seven staging tracks with lengths from 21-28 feet. Staging represents Bluefield, WV on the east end and Williamson, WV on the west. The double-ended staging combined with the continuous-running-loop design of the layout allows trains to be recycled as often as needed to model a busy mainline, and seven tracks allows a local mine run plus a passenger train, coal train, and general freight train in each direction. There is not much clearance between the staging level and visible tracks, so the intent is to use a single benchwork with staging directly on top and risers for the upper level and scenery. Also, the yard ladder for the Williamson side of staging is inaccessible from under the scenery, so I envision a long section of removable backdrop for emergency access when needed, and some sort of sensor system or closed-circuit TV for operators to ensure their trains are in-the-clear and running correctly in this section. This removable backdrop section conveniently enables access to the hidden track between Davy and Asco as well.

Operations

This layout has plenty to keep anywhere from 1-3 operators busy for a couple hours. The primary operations would consist of mainline trains making their way east and west across the Pokey. Because everything is double-track and the modeled section short, a dispatcher isn’t really needed if trains are simply run in sequence in both directions, alternating among coal drags, general freights, and passenger trains recycled as needed. Once a session, a local mine run would come out from staging to work the two tipples. The Marytown tipple has a short run-around for working the stub tracks. The Asco tipple has no run-around, so the mine run would need to use the siding at Davy to run-around the train as needed to shove the empty hoppers up the branch (not an uncommon practice in the coal fields).

If one wanted to keep more operators busy, a dispatcher and third mainline crew could be added with the crossovers between mains used as passing sidings for trains moving in the same direction–not required, but it would certainly add a lot more operation.

Things I Like About this Plan:

• Continuous double-track running loop
• Infinite operations (continuous loop and double-ended staging)
• Giant 2-8-8-2s at near eye-level
• Some local operations mixed in with the mainline running
• Neat prototypical scene at Marytown
• Generous aisles

Things I Don’t Like About this Plan:

• Swing-out adds complexity/headache
• Grades in both directions to climb out of staging
• Some tough-to-access track on the staging level
• Missing scenes from the prototype (e.g., Twin Branch)