The Bee Line Railroad/Bristol & Oxford Railroad

Two operator positions
Both railroads will be operated by the guest operators
1st railroad then 2nd railroad

The BEE Line Railroad is an imagined short line railroad located somewhere in the southwestern United States that serves the communities of Bradley, Estelle and Edwards.   It interchanges with the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe railroads.   The time frame is roughly the 1980’s.

The layout, 10’ x 10’, is primarily a switching layout with a small section of mainline at the south end crossing over the two-foot lift-bridge.

• Trains will arrive on and be disassembled using the Greenfield and Jackson arrival tracks.   
• Trains will be assembled using the Greenfield and Jackson classification tracks in Estelle. 
• Trains will depart from the Greenfield and Jackson departure tracks. 
• The two-foot lift-up bridge provides access into the layout and a means to ‘just run’ the trains in a loop when so desired.
• Operations are by car-card and waybills.
• The layout is powered by NCE DCC.

The BEE Line has two jobs.  They can be sole operators or two-man crews, engineer and conductor.

Estelle is a small city featuring a street, store fronts and people going about their daily business.   To the west are the Estelle Power Plant and its substation that provides power to the local communities and the Magarac Steel Recyclers Company located to the east.   The power plant receives open hopper loads of coal.  

To the east, the Magarac Steel Recyclers Company receives gondolas of scrap steel which it recycles into new steel using an electric furnace.   Rolls of coiled steel are produced in the Rolling Mill and shipped out in special coil cars.

Edwards is rural area just outside of Estelle that is the home of the Edwards Grain Growers Association.   Grains from local growers are stored in their silos and later shipped out to customers in covered hoppers.  

To the southeast is the Edwards Asphalt Company which receives hoppers of aggregate and tank cars of crude petroleum for making the asphalt.   Asphalt is shipped out to local areas in trucks.  

Just to the west of the asphalt plant is the Silvera’s Lumber Company which receives shipments of lumber on flat cars and in double-door box cars.   Adjacent to Silvera’s is the Edwards Caboose and Ready Track along with a Team Track.  Small businesses in Edwards use the Team Track to ship and receive goods. 

Bradley is an industrial area to the southwest of Estelle.    The ‘Port of Bradley’ is not a seaport in the desert, but a freight depot modeled after the ‘Port of Tucson. ’ It receives cargo in box cars, flat cars, and gondolas.   It offloads cargo for local business to pick up.   And it loads cargo from local business and ships it out to distant customers.    

The Amalgamated Chemical Company receives tank cars of feed-stock chemicals and blends them to make intermediate and finished chemical products that are shipped out to end-user customers.   Other operational supplies may arrive in box cars or hoppers.

The Bradley Yard is located just to the east of the arrival/departure tracks.  It is a small facility for servicing and refueling locomotives along with a locomotive ready track, a caboose track and a RIP track.  Currently, the BEE Line owns two GP9’s locomotives that were previously owned and now patched out with the BEE Line logo.   It also owns six hopper cars used for hauling sand and coal.

The B&O (Bristol & Oxford) is an imagined short line railroad located somewhere in the southwestern United States that serves the communities of Bristol and Oxford.  The time frame is roughly the 1970’s.

The HO layout size is 4’ x 6’ and is primarily a switching layout with trains running between the two cities.  

• Trains will be assembled in Bristol and in Oxford, travel to the destination cities and then cars will be set out in their designated locations. 
• Operations are by car-card and waybills.
• The layout is powered by NCE DCC.
• While this is a small layout, the challenge is to build a six car train plus a locomotive and caboose using a run-around and lead track that each will only accommodates four cars.

The B&O has two jobs.  They can be sole operators or two-man crews, engineer and conductor.

• Each job has two runs, a morning run and an afternoon run.

This small layout was constructed to show that you can have a layout that is fun to operate in a limited space. 

• Cars that originate from a Bristol business have a final destination in Oxford – and vise versa.

As an example, livestock is loaded into stock cars at the pens in Bristol and then get transported to the Oxford Meat Packers.  Process meats from the Oxford Meat Packers are then transported to Bristol in refrigerated cars.  It’s a similar operation for all of the industries and businesses