Welcome to Slate Fork Country!
It's late winter 1978. The nation is Star Wars crazy and disco drunk, and a California band calling itself "Van Halen" has just released its debut album.
Things are a little less frenzied and somewhat more traditional in the hollers of Appalachia though. Take the Southern Railway's Slate Fork Branch, a former short line founded in the early 1920s by a Midwest steel consortium. It's been moving coal to the steel mills of Alabama much as it has for the past 50 years. The only significant changes were a pair of new EMD SD-9s that replaced aging second-hand steam locomotives in the mid 1950s, followed by the loss of independence when the Slate Fork Railway came under the Southern's flag in the early 1960s (about the same time, but with considerably less public attention, as Southern's acquisition of the nearby Interstate Railroad).
Located like the Interstate in the extreme southwest corner of Virginia, near the borders of Kentucky and Tennessee, the former Slate Fork Railway interchanged cars not only with the Southern, but also with the Louisville & Nashville, providing the L&N and Southern with a steady, if not large, stream of coal and miscellaneous traffic.
Another interchange partner, the shortline Cumberland & Appalachia, a former logging railroad, still interchanges outbound loads of finished hardwood and softwoods with the former Slate Fork at C&A Junction.
(Just as an aside, the hamlet of Slaty Fork, WV, was neither a conscious nor subconscious namesake of the Slate Fork Branch. Neither was Slate Falls on Tony Koester's Allegheny Midland. Although I did borrow a bit from Tony's Coal Fork Extension of his famed Midland Road.)
As part of the merger terms, the L&N wrangled trackage rights from the Interstate Commerce Commission, accessing the Slate Fork Branch via its former interchange site at Slate Fork Junction. The Southern and L&N serve the branch's industries via reciprocal switching agreement. A Southern mine run serves the run-of-mine tipple at Creek Junction, VA and exclusively at Slate Fork, while the L&N serves the C&A interchange, Ajax Powder in the Slate Fork, and the truck-dump tipple in Flanary VA.
Operations
East of the junction, the L&N and Southern operate under Timetable & Train Orders. Inbound Southern crews arrive at Creek Junction with a train order already instructing them to meet their extra counterpart (the very train they're on) at Slate Fork on the outbound trip. The Southern's L&N counterpart, dubbed the L&N Switcher, also runs as an extra to and from Loyall, KY.
Car management is simple, using switch lists randomly generated on an Excel spreadsheet. All tipples are served daily, while Hercules Powder (which operates a ammonium nitrate bulk facility) and C&A interchange traffic is more random.
Cumberland & Appalachia motive power is seldom seen at C&A junction. The junction is located at the extreme southern end of the C&A, with end of track just a few hundred feet south. Moreover, the C&A is the senior railroad, coming up the valley six months ahead of the Slate Fork Railway!
Before granting an easement, C&A ownership insisted on a lighted smashboard swing gate signal, and the junction is currently replete with lighted fixed-aspect distant signals on SFRy's approaches to the junction, an addition from the 1950s after an inattentive SFRy crew failed to stop before the gate, damaging it and a C&A train! Thus the somewhat elaborate (and extravagant, to the frugal Southern Railway's thinking) use of SA signals as fixed-aspect distant signals. But really, it gives me a plausible reason to have some low-tech signaling on the layout, which also adds operational interest.
Track Plan
Timetable
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