The Cumberland Southern - Bear Creek Branch is an HO gauge model railroad that occupies a 12 by 24 and a 12 by 19 foot room in a basement in southwestern Ohio. The area actually modeled is the Bear Creek Branch which theoretically runs from Lynchburg, Virginia southeast to Appomattox, Virginia. The time is in the early Autumn of 1957. It is a joint effort of a father, his grown son, and a small group of friends.
The railroad is a point to point operation with several online towns and interchanges. These are, heading eastbound, Frostbite Falls, Franklin, Vaughn, Hill Valley, Whitfield, Raccoon Cove, Elizaville, Teaberry, Ledbetter, Ellerton, and Shelbyville. There are two staging yards, one west of Frostbite Falls, representing the junction with the CS main at Lynchburg Virginia, and another east of Shelbyville representing the branch's terminus at Appomattox, Virginia. The major points of interest of each city are as follows. Frostbite Falls has a junkyard and a small creamery. There is also a wye here so locomotives can be turned, as this is as far as the local trains that originate on the branch line normally operate. Franklin has a saw mill, a sash and door company, and a couple of other smaller industries. Vaughn has a company that builds outhouses, Peerless Prefab Privies. Hill Valley has a passenger station. Whitfield has 2 coal mines, Calvin Coal Co. and Loam Mining Co., a truck dump which also loads out coal, a lumberyard, and a casket company. This is also where one of the Clinch Lumber Co. logging lines connects. The Clinch Lumber Company has trackage rights over the line from their log load out here in Whitfield over to their sawmill at Franklin. Raccoon Cove is where Clinch Lumber Co. has their shops, and their is also a grocery warehouse and a retail coal dealer here. In Elizaville there is a junction with the C & O and also a crate and barrel factory. Teaberry has a large coal fired power plant. Ledbetter has a large coal mine and is also the home of the Trojan Roofing & Shingle Co. Ellerton represents a somewhat more urban city, with industries more typical of a larger commercial area, and it is also where CS has an interchange with the Norfolk & Western. Bear Creek Yard is just outside of Ellerton and is where all of the locals originate that serve the towns and industries on the branch line. Shelbyville has a passenger station and a small freight station. Layout construction is L-girder with OSB (oriented strand board) sub-roadbed. Track is various brands of code 100 nickel silver flex track and commercial turnouts, all supported on a roadbed of cork. The CS mainline is about 185 feet in length with passing sidings in Franklin, Ledbetter, and Whitfield, and a small yard outside of Ellerton. Staging consists of 5 stub tracks at Appomattox and 4 at Lynchburg. There are about 50 turnouts, so there is an emphasis on local switching in our operating sessions. All turnouts are hand thrown except those in the staging yard and at the far ends of the wyes that are push button operated with twin coil switch machines using a diode matrix. Electrical control consists of Digitax DCC. Scenery is Structolite wall plaster over window screen, with the rocks cast in rubber molds. A backdrop is painted directly on the room walls and extends all the way to the ceiling. Ground cover is lichen, polyester foam, homemade ground foam (carpet pad run thru a meat grinder and dyed green), dyed sawdust, natural rock and dirt, and commercial ground foam. Structures include kitbashed plastic, metal, plaster, and wood kits, as well as numerous scratch built structures and bridges. There are better than 150 vehicles on the layout and about that many people and animals. Diesel power consists of F7’s and various EMD cab units from Athearn, Stewart, and Proto 2000. There are also several BL2’s with high short hoods. These are made from 2 AHM BL2 shells and use Athearn frames and drive components, and are powered by Canon printer motors. It is normal practice to run these, and all other road switchers, long hood forward. STeam power consists of various rod and geared locmotives from Spectrum, and a pair of Model Die Casting Shays for Clinch Lumber. Rolling stock consists of mostly plastic kits from Athearn, Model Die Casting, Proto 2000 and others. Probably about half of these have been custom painted and lettered. All locomotives and rolling stock are weathered, and have metal wheel sets. This is the fourth layout, in the third basement, that we have built using this name. This particular one was started in October of 2000, and replaced the previous one started in February of 1995, soon after the house was completed at the end of 1994. The current layout was expanded into the 12 by 19 room in 2004, adding the towns of Raccoon Cove, Ledbetter, Teaberry, and Elizaville. Prior to this expansion, there had just been a loop of track out there joining the two points where it poked thru the wall. One may wonder why the last layout (seen elsewhere on this website) came down after being finished and regularly operated for some years. There are a number of reasons, but the main one is that our interests changed. The previous layout was very much a mainline operation, but this had some serious drawbacks with only about 75 feet of mainline. There were also some rather serious civil engineering issues with the old layout, primarily involving steep grades, and too many industries and track in a given area. We wanted to correct some of these deficiencies, and I probably drew upwards of 200 trackplans over the last several years. Some got no further than just being initial sketches, others were quite detailed. The plan that we eventually built came about in the late summer of 2000, and the more we played around with it, the more convinced we were that we wanted to go ahead with it. It offered much broader curves, and a little more than double the mainline length. It also had shallower grades, provisions for turning locomotives at both ends of the run, and was true point to point, plus it had more generous aisle widths and better accessibility for switching. We hadn't really thought about the branch line concept too much, until I bought O. Winston Link's book on the N & W, The Last Steam Railroad In America, which has a couple of chapters on their Abingdon Branch. That pretty well did it, as we realized that this was a valid prototype that ran short trains between small towns and used a lot of older equipment (small steam) in the process. This interested me as I had acquired some of the better plastic steam engines that had recently become available. This also was the influence to move the period that we modeled back a few years from 1962 to 1957.The final influence on this was probably a recent visit to a local HOn3 layout, which like many narrow gauge operations had a kind of rundown and make do appearance. I wanted to have this as well, only in standard gauge, (not that I don't like narrow gauge, I just have way too much standard gauge stuff) and creating a branch line of our existing class one seemed like a good way to do it.
Also, some may have noticed that as part of the change to the new layout, The New River Electric Railroad And Lighting Company, which had its own right of way on the old layout, has none on the new layout. As a result, it got merged into Cumberland Southern Lines, and in theory now all of its weird, one of a kind, diesels congregate on the various Cumberland Southern branch lines, and on the Bear Creek Branch in particular.