Another milestone today–the Southern Railway staging yard tracks are now complete! The yard, representing Appalachia, Virginia, consists of 8 hand-laid switches and about 40 pieces of flex track. The yard is three tracks on a reversing loop, one through track for mainline running (which can be used as a fourth staging track), and two short storage tracks for extra locomotives.

The shortest staging track is about 21 feet long–that’s long enough for three locomotives, a cab, and 35-45 hoppers. . . should be plenty. A second, 4-track stub-ended staging yard with shorter tracks will help with L&N trains and holding excess cars.

I also fixed a problem with this website where the smaller images weren’t linked to their full-size cousins–that’s remedied now if you’d like to get a closer view of previous post pictures. Thanks to Stuart Thayer for pointing that out!