C&O's Unique Vintage Stations

I think Rich Melvin did a video of New River Gorge, might be some footage in it. May be available from OGR Store

Try the C&O Historical website.  They have lots of photos & drawings of everything.  www.cohs.org

Prince WV (near Beckley) is a unique C&O station for sure....and it's in use 3 times a week for the Amtrak Cardinal. It was the small town prototype station for the Chessie as I understand it. A modern Deco style with a great interior. A big Chessie cat is made from tile in the center of the waiting room. I plan a modified version on my layout. 

Here is an N-scale kit of the type of C&O station you are looking for. You might get them to sell you a set of plans you could scan and enlarge for O-scale and scratch-build it.

http://www.mjbmodels.com/n-scale-models/co-tower/

Mr. Don Eastman of Sarnia/Blenheim, Ont. Canada has built many of the C&O stations and interlocking towers in "O" Gauge for the COHS at Clifton Forge, VA which are displayed on their Heritage Center train layout.
He has also built stations and towers for several of the COHS members.  He built a interlocking tower for me for Cabin Creek Jct, West Virginia which is identical to the
NI Tower at Prince shown in the pictures below.

Also picture of CA Tower with C&O K4 2705..........
The pictured combination tower/yard office is a view of the back of the QN Quinnimont
office....

I believe that Tony Koester, model railroader extraordinaire, modeled this sort of architecture heavily in his now-departed Allegheny Midland HO railroad.  I also believe that somewhere in the dark recesses of my aging cranium are memories of MR or RMC articles that had the same for topical/modeling discussion.

As per other threads on the subject, the HO realm has a lot more choices...especially in the structure/architecture arena...from which to get info for O.  If you can find/borrow a set of plans in HO for the structure you desire, and have some basic scratch-building skills, simply double the dimensions.

Quinnimont, WV comes to mind...

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/511-945HO

FWIW, always...

KD

I understood that all of the prototypes were gone?  Is that true? It was mentioned above that one survived into the 1980's? The N scale one above is the style I had in mind, and one I had not heard of (Backbone, Va.) Odd that they offer HO kits, also, but not of that station, however, I don't doubt that they have been offered by others in HO.  Quinnimont has a rectangular tower, and is less appealing to me.  I won't build one because it would look really funny on a Colorado-themed layout,(unless one surfaced as a kit, and I couldn't help myself) but I was wondering if anybody had modeled one, or, even, the town of Thurmond, in O scale/gauge.  There was a guy from Louisville, Ky., who showed up at a few shows..Wheaton?..with a really good model of a towered C&O station in O scale, offering it for sale (not cheap), and offering to build others.  I guessed that that one, at least, found a home, and that other O gaugers/scalers would have built examples.

BTS (Better Than Scale) has issued or will be issuing in the future several O scale craftsman kits of C&O stations and structures. In the "future" releases are the Quinnimont Station without the second story tower and the hopefully the Thurmond, WVA station.

http://www.btsrr.com/bts7652.htm

http://www.btsrr.com/bts7651.htm

I've built their C&O MD Cabin, Thurmond crew quarters, and standard section house kits and they are extremely well done. I highly recommend them. The kis do take time to assemble, but they are well designed and everything fits together with little or no modifications needed.

Ken

If you are not too picky I could see this C&O station kit bashed from the Atlas station available now.

The Atlas station combined with DPM or other kit for the tower part.

Photo from Walthers catalog HO model.

Don't like the square tower?  Then I assume we're talking about something like this...

Nice, but not sure where to find it in O.  Maybe HO??

KD

AMC Dave:  I quickly dug out two paperback books I have from the C&O Historical Society, which show the octagonal towered stations, but not Prince, which photo I have seen somewhere (is, was it towered?).  "Riding The New River Train" shows Sewell, W.Va., in a 1957 photo as the last surviving octagonal towered station. The HS's "C&O Standard Structures" shows several examples of the octagonal towered station, and of, a free standing oct. tower, and states that 1/4" scale plans of the towered stations are available from the HS, which means BTS could easily offer one of these.  One of the oct. towered stations is show at Hawk's Nest, W. Va., location of a state park, and a put-in site for a raft trip I took down the New River years ago (I was too busy avoiding becoming afloat in the moat to worry about the railroad structures above)  I did not visit the Thurmond site for several years, although I passed below it, and the crew quarters was gone by then.  Thurmond, with its sidewalk immedately against the tracks, always makes me think of a drunk stepping out of a bar there, and into the path of a train, and is an example of an interesting ghost town east of the Mississippi.

Prince WV as it looks today.......

Here is my Prince station made with Model Builder Software.

Scott Smith

That is not the Prince station I think I have seen in photos, obviously a more recent

replacement, but I don't remember if the earlier one was towered, and didn't find it in

my search of handy books.

I don't remember what the station at Cotton Hill looked like. Most people probably didn't know there was one. Also I think the water at Cotton Hill was the last standing on the C&O until the late sixty's or early seventies.

Bill 

The current station was built 1942 with the wood station you talk about built in 1880. I'm sure C&O historical would have info.

I found I had two more books on the C&O, one exclusirvely on the K-2. K-3, and K-3a

Mikes, that I have never understood why at least one version hasn't been made in 3 rail, and the other a Staufer and others book on "C&O Power".   This last does not have a glossary, so flipping through it looking for "Prince", Boxcar Bill, I discovered comments about Cotton Hill.  First, a "neat brick depot" is described at Cotton Hill, and then an embarrasment there for Pennsy fans.  The book reports that just after WWII, a Pennsy T-1 was borrowed by the C&O to test on the run from Cincinnati through the New River Gorge pulling a 14 car passenger train usually handled by C&O L Hudsons.  One of its stops was Cotton Hill, on a sharp curve and a slight grade.  The

Hudsons regularly made this stop.  The T-1 hung up, spun its drivers, and could not

start the train, so a helper had to be sent out.  Books says it is possible C&O engineers on board did not know how to get the most out of the T-1.

The PRR T1 did not stall at Cotton Hill.  The test report for this series of runs exists at the C&O archives, and shows a 30-second stop.  No problem getting away. 

In Gene Huddleston's book, Riding that New River Train, he retracted the statement in C&O Power, said  no such stall happened at Cotton Hill and that the stall actually occurred at Waynesboro.  The test report confirms this.  See details in C&O History, May 2005 issue.

"Waynesboro"? (Pa.)?.  Errors get into print.  I pulled that statement out of the Staufer

book (who had some prestige in railroad writing).  Maybe somebody badmouthing a

competitor?  I was skimming through looking for C&O stations, and that quote caught

my eye, as someone above had just mentioned Cotton Hill.  My friend wanted a model

of the T-1, but has never liked the price, although having seen them in action.

Nope, Waynesboro, VA, just before C&O crossed Afton mountain eastbound. 

You can't be too hard on the three co-authors of C&O Power (1965??).  They were using the best available information at the time.  I doubt the C&O test report  had surfaced then.  Dr. Huddleston revised his position in his New River book ca 1987/1993.  The fact that he did so publicly showed he had a lot of personal and professional integrity.  That book got me started on 20 years of T1 research.  I figured if that was wrong (and believe me I quoted the Cotton Hill event just like you did), what else was off center?  I found out that most of what passed for T1 history prior to 1989 was largely fiction, too much entertainment and too few facts.  A lot of articles have been written since detailed research started in the very late 1980's.  Even using dry old dusty facts, it's a pretty wild ride!

I built a model of the Cotton Hill Station in HO Gauge using the drawings found

Here>>>http://cohs.org/repository/Archives/cohm/web/cohm-2004-06.jpg

Nice work. Them there are some fast growing trees!!

there is a gentleman who shows up at the Parma Oh TCA meets as well as the Dalton Oh show who does laser buildings. he has a built and painted model of a C&O station with the tower on it in o scale. i think my son has his contact info and i'll see if i can get more info on this for you. he mostly sells built and painted items . marty