Page 14 - November December 2001

GLASGOW,VIRGINIA
Richard Hood
Following a visit to this year’s N&W convention in Portsmouth VA, we continued west to Roanoke, a must for any follower of the N&W, and then up the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.
Conversations with an acquaintance who is an ex N&W, now NS engineer had brought to my attention the interchange between the N&W and C&O at Glasgow VA and I was interested to see this place for myself as railroad interchanges have a fascination for me. I will use the old railroad names in the text, though the rails now belong to Norfolk Southern and CSX.
Arriving at Glasgow from the beauty spot of Natural Bridge, one is somewhat taken aback by the strangeness of the town. It appears that a piece of grassland about a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide has been crossed by a chequer board of small roads and a number of typical Appalachian type wooded houses, which have been sprinkled in a random manner on the grass. The centre, if that is what you would call it, is a fire station and gas station. Driving to the north end of the town gave a reason for its otherwise unlikely position in this non- coal mining mainly agricultural countryside, a carpet factory.
It did not take long to find the reason for our visit. To the north-west lay the N&W Shenandoah Valley line and to the south lay the C&O James River line, the town being fitted in between. A line,
sometimes single track sometimes double, followed a lazy “S” from the N&W, by the carpet factory into the small C&O yard at Balcony Falls (this had cause me some confusion, Glasgow and Balcony Falls are in effect the same place.). The C&O end was also one leg of a wye. The Balcony Falls depot was still standing, as was the coaling tower and water tank. Unfortunately the N&W Glasgow depot has gone but the small yard remains and is still occasionally used for interchange traffic as well as maintenance of way equipment.
It struck me that the track layout here would make an interesting layout design, as as well as the interchange traffic the C&O had trackage rights north on the N&W and the N&W have been known to run to Lynchburg on the C&O James River line. The James Lee Carpet factory received deliveries of plastic, latex and coal as well as sending out carpets in box cars. The design shown is a simplified version of what is on the ground.
Though both main lines are single track, at Glasgow long passing tracks give the impression of double tracks. The design is made to fit a standard 16’ x 8’ garage, which I hope will be my minimum space available at my next house, with 2 ft. radius hidden curves and 2’ 6” radius for the wye and transfer tracks, and uses mainly medium radius Peco points. The main changes in the layout are that the sidings are considerably longer in real life, there are sidings inside the C&O wye and the interchange track reduces to a
single track in its middle section. Obviously the hidden sections of track at each end could be extended with the addition of storage tracks or even a complete return loop.
I am indebted to Jimmy Lisle for his sketch map, on which the layout is based, and this description of how the interchange was operated in N&W days.
“We would pull into Glasgow from the south with about 100 empty C&O hoppers and stop clear of the crossover north of Glasgow depot. We would reverse through the points as if we were going down the C&O leg of the wye and drop off the caboose. Then pull forward before reversing down through the double “S” bend down the other track to what we called the Hyco track (the sound of screaming flanges must have been deafening, as these are tight curves). When the train was fully in the siding we would uncouple and pull forward to pick up the caboose. The caboose would be pushed round the wye alongside our train until we could pick up the brakeman who had ridden the first coal hopper to the end of Hyco track. We then return back to the N&W where we backed the caboose down to the loaded hoppers which the C&O had left for us on our passing track in Glasgow yard. We then ran the power around to the front of the train and backed the whole train out onto the main. This was to let us get a run up the grade south out of Glasgow where we would be lucky to see more than 15mph. At Lithia we would have to
14 ROUNDHOUSE