Monday, November 21, 2011

Quinnimont, WV

Funny name, interesting location:

Quinnimont (which comes from Latin, meaning "Five Mountains") was formed around an iron furnace on an unusually large (for the New River Gorge) area of flat bottom land. The furnace didn't last, but coal traffic did.

To the railroad, this is an important point as it's where the Laurel Creek branch meets the mainlines and not far from the Piney Creek branch at Prince. In addition, there is a small yard to handle the traffic from these branches.

Enough with the historic mumbo jumbo, I know you're dying for some pictures...

Below is an overall view of the newest addition so far:



I designed it to interface with the Prince segment via a small "filler" segment that can be replaced with another filler to suit the space available. For the 10 foot wide section of basement that the layout is in, a 18" filler is used, as shown below.



From there, the mains (and yard) curves along the river, then splits off into the wye. You can see my notations written on the subroadbed denoting which lines are the mainlines (westbound and eastbound).



Inside the wye will be the passenger station, express building, boiler/sand house, and a few other structures (including the ruins of the iron furnace). Here I'm plotting approximate locations of some of these using drawings copied to scale.



Towards the opposite end of the wye, you can see the gap cut for Laurel Creek, as well as the trackwork diverging out into the "new yard" (at left in this pic) and to the wye and engine service area at right. (The two straight parallel tracks are the engine servicing area). The two nearest turnouts in this pic will be on the mainlines.



And last but not least... just beyond the creek will be the iconic QN Cabin (still in the box).



Beyond that will be the "old yard" which is between the two mainlines as opposed to on one side... this presents some operational challenges, but that's part of the appeal of modeling this area.

Until next time....