Starting A GE 70 Tonner.

[FCIN]

My railroader's eye tells me that Old Grand dad was a lot of switching.

It sure was! With limited room to work the tracks in the distillery, you had to have your train blocked out more or less in spotting order leaving Frankfort. If you didn't have your train blocked out that way, you could have easily find yourself in a real mess. But even with your cars blocked you'd still have to swap cars around as the distillery provided you with their own switch list showing were they wanted specific cars placed. Some of the cars we'd bring to the distillery would be held for loading/unloading the next trip and we'd have to add others that had been held on previous trips into the mix.

You'd have to move cars back and forth between the tracks to line up your spots and at the same time, line up your outbound cars and re-spots. Wasn't unusual to have hold of 15 or 20 cars while making your moves. Now and then, we'd be so short on working room, that we'd have to pick out as many of our outbound cars as we could and take them back to the main line and leave them so we'd have room to work.

All that doesn't even take into account that in the last years of operation, we had to separate all loaded cars with empties going to and from Frankfort, and often had to make two or three trips up the hill to get all the cars delivered. Talk about a headache!

Switching at Stagg (Schenley) wasn't as bad because you had plenty of room to line things up in the Stagg yard tracks, but there were a lot of long moves involved and very tight clearances inside the plant. Moving around the plant track to spot your coal and grain cars, the train just barely cleared the bottling house and was in a very tight curve. L&N "Big Blue" and similar sized 100-ton covered hoppers just cleared that building by inches.

Modeling the Old Grand Dad plant, even in a compressed form, would make for an interesting switching layout. About the only problem would be having structures on both the front and back of the layout, but then all of the buildings at Grand Dad were fairly low in height, with the exception of the still and powerhouse, which would be on the back side of the layout. Just stage your inbound train on the spur as though it was just arriving at the distillery and when finished go back to that position as though you were going back to the main line. There were plenty of trees on either side of the spur coming into the plant that would help to disguise the staging.