The general location of my model of the Cornelia coal trestle was established early on; just north of the oak tree on the way "out of town", generally following the positioning of this feature on the prototype. The effort to design the model began with stacking and rearranging lots of pieces of scrap wood on the worktable to try to get a sense of the geometry of the thing. A key factor was the need to keep the design very open so as to allow easy blowing of the leaves, acorns and other debris that pour like a woody waterfall off the giant oak tree overhead. A secondary goal was to repurpose a rugged looking piece of wood saved from the little laundry room that preceded the nice porch that we have now, which is the horizontal piece with the rusty nail holes on the middle level in the photo below:
From there I carefully cut and attached everything together into the first version of the trestle, but upon mounting it on the line and attaching the 1/2" conduit to reveal the shape of the track I was dismayed to see how incredibly steep the approach would be!
This seemed like it was sure be a source of trouble when trying to spot hopper cars atop the trestle, so it was back to the worktable to cut the legs down to a more reasonable height. By also moving the switch farther up the line I ended up with a much more gradual slope. Here's a long shot of the whole siding.
As an added bonus, the longer grade allowed me to build in a flat spot large enough to spot a car about halfway up the slope, shown here centered on the post on the left.
I'm planning to model this spot as the Spencer ice factory, proceeding with the idea that northbound and southbound reefer cars would have been iced at this plant before proceeding up the TFRR or being spotted on the Southern Ry interchange track before moving on to the wider world. Perhaps additional research will reveal a photo of this operation! Here's a stock photo of a model icing platform in HO scale:
In the meantime, the next elements to complete were the supports along the grade. This was extremely easy to do with the plastic conduit in place, as I only had to position the boards that would become the piers next to the conduit to see how tall each one needed to be, as well as the angle of slope atop each. These are spaced roughly 12" apart, allowing plenty of room to dispatch any leaves and other debris with the power blower.
Now all that remains is to lay track, which will happen as soon as my back order of flex ties is finally fulfilled, and then to model the little hut that was positioned at the left end of the middle level, which I can only presume was a place for the wheelbarrow operators to get out of the weather when not working the coal pile.
