weyerhauseur also used 70 tonners on their Sutherland Branch in Oregon. The reason for this was due to a weight restriction on a bridge.
Oh, certainly there are precedents for 44-tonners and 70-tonners in the woods, but if someone were trying to pull a string of 20 fully loaded centerbeams of finished lumber up a grade it would not probably be pulled by a single 44-tonner.
When I had my East Texas layout, I had a simple spur off the main oval to serve NEOLA RELOAD when logs felled "elsewhere" down a road were broad by truck to be loaded onto skelton log cars. My reload spur required adding a 6 inch and one foot addition to my existing layout. I planned to use that spur as a future connection to an expansion of the mainline. IF that had happened (for various space and other reasons), I would have moved the reload over just a few inches and used the former main oval at that point as if it were a spur-- without actually pulling up any track. You may see the front of an Alco S-2 at the left edge of the picture, painted in the same company colors as the logging trucks and crane. I used a regular "railroad sized" switcher for the logging company. The reload was located on the trunkline railroad (Santa Fe) and the logging train ran by trackage rights for a short ways over the Santa Fe. This was similar to the real life Kirby Lumber Company logging trams in east Texas in the 1950s. The logging train ran to a connection with its own trackage which ran a short distance off the mainline railroad through the woods to a lumber mill. The lumber company's track was chartered as a common carrier railroad, so it handled TWO operations separately for business and regulatory reasons. It carried finished lumber back to the interchange with the mainline railroad to go by Santa Fe to wherever its customers were-- several lumberyards in the (unmodeled) nearby big city, a lumberyard in the (also unmodeled) port city, etc. Of course, that was by STAGING. Most serious railroading is done between suppliers and customers than are more than a mile or two apart. The mill also took in an occasional car of fuel oil and diesel to fuel the mill and its truck and loco fleet. I also planned to ship out wood chips to an (unmodeled) paper mills but never got around to bashing the chip cars. I said the logging line was a common carrier. It had one customer not connected with the logging company, the J J Stone gravel pit. The logging company's common carrier, Johnston and East Texas, served the pit with cars furnished by Santa Fe. They interchanged with Santa Fe to take the cars (via staging again) to Highway Department yards, and the J J Stones gravel and ready-mix concrete facilities. Are you getting the picture that most traffic does not begin and end on the modeled layout but comes or goes to or from somewhere else? In the main town served by my trunkline, I had a spur used by a team track AND as a loading facility for a pulpwood buyer, who bought pulpwood from small operators who brought it in by truck. We loaded several pulpwood rack cars every two or three days to be shipped by the Santa Fe to the paper mill (off layout). The town also had a wood preservation plant, "Creotex". Untreated poles and tie "blanks" came in from a cutting area near the Texas-Louisiana border (yeh, you guessed it- not modeled). Also got coal tar creosote by tank car from a local train on the Santa Fe coming from the other direction. Creotex shipped one rare gondola of treated ties a year to the local logging company for its track. Most ties went to various shortlines and terminal railroads, including one at the port. They did NOT got to Santa Fe because Santa Fe had its own very specific tie plant the prototype of which would not fit my layout. Treated poles and posts ship to utility companies, lumber yards and farm supply stores. Lots and lots of traffic. Almost none of it contained entirely on the modeled portion of the layout. One other proviso. I abandoned and dismantled the layout because the curves were too tight to run trains over 8 or 9 cars reliably or to run even short passenger trains. If I were building a new layout with an oval continuous loop and trying to do it in minimum size, and using sectional track, I would go for the widely available 11 radius for the main line, ven at the cost of an extra 3 inches or so of width.
Ken, in the photo of the Creotex plant, theres a brick building in the upper left of the photo. Whose is it ? A kit, scratched? Thanks lv4142003
The brick building towards the back of the scene, across Texas Route 105 from the Creosote plant, is Johnston High School, home of the Johnston Lumberjacks football team. It is from an article and plan that was in Railroad Model Craftsman back in October 1984 p.77. The article was about a scratchbuilt model of an early 20th century Chicago elementary school-- actually a wedge shaped front and a bit of one side-- same as mine. My model is not exactly scratchbuilt but is "PLAN-BASHED." I photocopied the RMC plan to N scale on index-card weight cardstock and used a watercolor marker to colorize the window frame so it would not be all black and white. I glued Walthers N scale brick paper to the brick portions, cut small bits of cardboard and painted grey for lintels, etc. For the archway, I used HALF of a fibre washed. My hobby dealer sold model fittings for model sailing ships and thats where I got the eagle sculpture over the door. Newton County in East Texas has/had a cutout figure of a giant woodsman according to "Eyes of Texas Travel Guide, Gulf Coast Ed."(1979) p.34. Since my town and school was named Johnston (in memory of a modeler friend named Ron Johnston who died in 1973), the mascot became the Johnston Lumberjacks. Has an alliterative ring to it. The lumberjack theme as mascot wouldn't stop. A logging industry theme restaurant was built in town, called the Lumberjack Cookhouse. Signs for miles up and down the highway make the traveler anticipate the stop. Another lumbering-related but non-railroad spur business in town is Hervil's Saw Shop and Hardware, a combination general hardware store and specialized saw shop. They display old antique saws outside. Gave me a place to use my N scale saws and saw blades from Republic Locomotive Works.
