Hi Jerry.
Thank you for the information. Will be waiting for its release.
Craig
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Kenny Eaton has that one. He was a NS conductor familiar with the nuances of that area, so I sent my Clinch-Appalachia route to him a few months ago. That includes the Interstate, as well as the L&N between Norton and Big Stone Gap. It also includes several former N&W branches that connect the Pokey to the Clinch Valley line. My hope is that he will detail it out, preferably for the 1965-1993 time frame when coal off the Interstate branches was delivered raw to the Westmoreland Transloader at the west edge of Appalachia and it was then loaded into unit trains, 2 of which ran on alternate days to either Belmont, NC (near Charlotte) or Catawba, NC (east of Statesville). My next complete route will be a 2nd version of the Knoxville Division, L&N which will include a lot more SR lines as well as the load point for another SR unit train that ran from ARCO (near Clairfield, TN) to Millidgeville, GA between 1067 & 1992.
Jerry
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Coal Field Route(s)
This afternoon I uploaded the first of probably a half dozen incomplete routes that will cover most of the coal fields in WV, VA, KY, and TN. This first one covers the part of Southern WV comprising the Winding Gulf field that was service mainly by the Virginian, on which this route is based, but also a few joint mines and few that were only served by the C&O. There are 47 mines if I count right but no more than 10 active today. I want to call your attention to a web site that has been up for some years and whose author maintains & updates it fairly regularly.
Also if anyone grabs my incomplete route you will find a directory in it which I called documentation/topo_overlays and in that, you will find several .kmz files. If you use Google Maps, up in the left corner you can open one of these kmz files and the result is a overlay of the topo map rather accurately, but not perfect, on the earth globe. In the case of several branches, the track was long gone but there was a irregularity on the earth where it should have been. But was that a track or a road---?? So I digitize the track on the topo map, which in many cases is a dashed line to show it was abandoned. Then I turn off the overlay and carefully check the digitized line in comparison to the earth's surface. Also use it to locate communities & roads too.
Jerry
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