BY RON FLANARY/PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR E
VERY NOW AND THEN, a little serendipity falls one’s way. Such was the case when my New Eng- land friend George Pitarys and I were re- cently discussing train orders and time tables (George is a retired operator and dispatcher) — and particularly dispatch- er train sheets. In today’s paperless en- vironment, these types of railroad ephemera are rare as railroads increas- ingly rely on electronic communication. Most railroads purged their train sheet records after a few years, but they were still available for any collector willing to do some “dumpster diving.”
So it was that George mentioned he might have some Louisville & Nashville dispatcher train sheets that someone salvaged long ago. And what was better, they were from the Cum- berland Valley Division, the section of the L&N system in my home region. All of them were from February and March 1969, so I selected a single day as being representative of L&N’s CV Division operations of that period to develop this feature.
Dispatchers used train sheets to record every significant detail of every train’s operation — its motive power, call times, locomotives, consist, over the road performance and any unusual oc- currences. In the case of the Cumberland Valley Division of the L&N, the dis- patchers’ office was located in a block building at Corbin, Ky., beside the pas- senger station. Every day, around the clock, someone was at that desk issuing train orders to operators, talking to train crewmen on the company dispatcher phone line or radio, flipping the switches on the CTC panel, and making all the de- cisions necessary to keep trains rolling efficiently and safely.
34 MARCH 2014 •
RAILFAN.COM L&N CV Division Overview
Before we take a look at the L&N’s CV Division operations on the 24 hours of Friday, March 21, 1969, a few back- ground basics on the division and rail- roading of that era in general might be helpful. No matter what compass direc- tion a train might be traveling on the CV, all movements away from Corbin were southbound, and toward Corbin were northbound. This was particular- ly strange on some branches, like the C&M and Straight Creek branches, where a geographically southbound train would be considered northbound in railroad terms.
The main stem of the CV was the Corbin to Norton main line, via Loyall and the switchback at Hagans, Va., (the only main line switch back in the nation). Until the connection to Hagans was completed in 1930, the original main line of the CV ran via Middles- boro and Cumberland Gap. After 1930, it was a light density line hosting only a local freight three times weekly. The principal branch lines of the CV included the Baxter-Lynch Poor Fork Branch, which served the huge mines of U.S. Steel at Lynch, and Internation- al Harvester (Wisconsin Steel) at Ben- ham. It was hardly a “branch,” since it was constructed to main line standards to handle the big time coal tonnage from Lynch and Benham. Another branch from Cumberland to
Scotia,
built in 1960, served a mine at the end of the line. The Martins’ Fork Branch connected Loyall with Hagans, and the Clover Fork Branch split off at Harlan Junction to the end of the line at Glen- brook. There were two forks of the Straight Creek Branch out of Pineville, the Puckett’s Creek Branch from
Blackmont to Alva, the Chenoa Branch, the Middlesboro Railroad, the branch from Pennington to St. Charles (via Southern trackage rights beyond Pocket), the C&M Branch, and a few other branches of less significance. The CV was entirely train order and timetable territory, with the exception
ABOVE LEFT: On July 13, 1966, a train order meet takes place at Hubbard Springs, Va., be- tween a Norton-Loyall extra and local freight 91 in the siding. The local’s conductor, M.B. Fleenor, performs the “roll by” inspection from the rear platform of his wooden cupola cab. ABOVE: On October 17, 1966, train 55 is making a noisy departure from Appalachia, Va., with big Alco C630 1426 under the com- mand of engineer Homer B. “Hot Box” Taylor. Extra 120 North has cleared up in the siding. RIGHT: On the first day of August 1969, Corbin-Norton freight 865 climbs the “moun- tain” at Kelly View, Va., behind an eclectic mix of two GP35s, an RS11 and two RS3s.
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