Thank you! The write-ups are the most fun part for me, backstory and research and the like is always a treat. I tend to use Trainz mostly as a visual aid for the writing stuff I do.
Gotta love the R2s! Vintage signals are my obsession in recent years, love fitting them in anywhere I can. One of these days I'll learn how to re-arrange these things and make some custom signal setups/aspects for SLRR. Lots of fun little ideas in that realm.
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R808 is the designation for the Pleasants Switcher. SLRR train symbols can be easily decoded - if one has a list of all the location numbers! R-trains are switchers and yard jobs, sometimes working the occasional very short local industry, while 8 designates the origin point - West Virginia. 08 denotes the terminal, yard, city, or other location of origin - in this case Willow Island, home to Pleasants Power Station and several chemical plants. R808 is one of the jobs that was always left to diesels, as putting together overhead wire for the whole small yard and the spurs was troublesome, especially with some clearance issues in certain spots. Mainline coal trains will drop off large cuts of coal-filled hoppers in the Pleasants railyard, which R808 is in charge of breaking up and delivering to the plants unloader. Why not have the mainline train do the unloading? Space constraints. The power station has plenty of room for piles of coal, but space between the plant and the start of the steep St. Marys grade was rather limited, and full unloading coal trains would block the main and road crossing for way too long to be feasible. Coming off of a steep downhill made that even more of a potential liability. Thus, the switcher was born. Coal isn't its only job anyway!
SD20Rs 4691 and 4695 spend plenty of time cutting up coal trains and setting out cuts of empties to be hauled back to Boaz Yard later, but also has other work to perform. Allnex and Solvay have large chemical plants just west of the power plant that are served by R808. L801, the Boaz-Grantsville local, make setouts of various tankers for R808 to bring to the chemical plants, and later will come back and pick up those tankers after the plants have filled or drained them, as needed. They also handle the filling of hoppers with fly ash from the power plant. On occasion, R808 has also taken care of L801s plastic hoppers that are meant to go to nearby SimEx Vinyl Extrusions - a short jaunt, just a few miles. Other days, other freight winds up in the Pleasants Yard where it isn't really meant to be. L801 doesn't run every day, so when R808 has free time, they take the 13-mile journey to the yard at Boaz to let them deal with the cars. In the case of 4691/4695 today, they've got a few empty plastic hoppers and some boxcars full of furniture that are bound for the midwest - not exactly meant to be in the power plant! Happily, with the power stations coal reserves full up, R808 gets to stretch its legs a little and head down to the main to get them to Boaz. M801-402, a manifest from Boaz to Dayton, Ohio, will get those cars headed in the right direction. The Pennsy signals make a stark reminder that this whole line wasn't always SLRRs.
We'll just conveniently disregard that this section of track irl was B&O, anyway!
In reality those cars are here due to iPortal shenanigans... constantly changing operations in a multi-month long ops session have cars winding up in strange places, certainly. More on that another time, anyway.
Cheers,
SM
Awesome pics! What JR route are those Pennsy signals from?
