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The Manns Creek Railway is a prototype narrow gauge railroad that operated 9 miles of track from 1886 to 1955. The railroad was located in Fayette County, West Virginia, and operated between the towns of Clifftop WV and Sewell, WV, and also serving the community of Landisburg, WV. Their primary function was to haul coal down from Clifftop to a coal transfer area in Sewell. At Sewell the coal was processed and loaded into standard gauge hopper cars on the C&O.
Logging was also done in the area around Clifftop. Logs were cut and hauled to a sawmill that was located in the company town of Landisburg. Cut lumber was hauled from Landisburg down to Sewell and reloaded into Standard gauge cars.
At its peak the Manns Creek operated with 8 geared locomotives, five of which were Shays and the other three were Climax locomotives. All rolling stock was built by the railroad.
My Layout is built in On3. The layout is a mushroom design and occupies a 400 sqft room. The layout can operate with 3-4 people. Control system is Digitrax DCC with TCS Wifi throttles. All locomotives are scratch built and have TCS Wow sound decoders. All rolling stock is scratch built from strip wood, with some using 3D printed parts I design and print myself. All track is hand-laid and all structures are scratch built to follow the prototype.
The unique feature of my layout is that the coal operation is all live loading and unloading. I use screened black rock to simulate coal. Coal is loaded at five locations around Clifftop and hauled down the 5.25% grade to a switch back. The trains then reverse direction and travel down the lower switch back to Sewell, where the coal is unloaded from the hopper cars on an unloading trestle. Each hopper car has a small motor that opens and closes the hopper car doors. The steep grades and heavy trains add a lot of drama to the operations.
