Gleason TN LDE

One town I’m considering for an LDE is Gleason, TN. Gleason is a very small town that has seen much better days. The old NC main line still runs through town but today it’s the KWT (Kentucky West Tennessee) shortline. I am leaning towards making Gleason the first LDE that I start modeling.

Here’s a track layout of the “heart” of Gleason. The track layout is close to a direct copy from the NC&StL engineering department track profile chart. The building with the two circles next to it is Spain Bros. Milling (that’s the current name, not sure what it was in the early 50s). The small rectangle south of the tracks is where the depot stood – it’s gone now. Downtown Gleason sits north of the depot and east of Spain Bros. Milling.

Spain Bros. Milling is a small, modelgenic milling operation. A few steel grain silos, corrugated siding with a nice assortment of rust and old signs. A very typical small town industry.

Downtown Gleason was never a major rail traffic destination or source – it’s the other industries to the east and west of Gleason that generated rail traffic.

Gleason is the center of the best ball clay mining area in the U.S. Very, very pure ball clay has been mined around Gleason for over a century. There’s a three county area around Gleason that sits on top of large deposits of some of the best ball clay in the world. Ball clay is a very pure, white clay that is used to make fine china and other ceramic products. It’s almost pure white because it has very small amounts of other minerals, especially iron. Ball clay is strip mined all over this region. There are abandoned ball clay pits everywhere and also many still active pits. There are several major shippers of ball clay still active on the KWT line, including the examples shown below.

This first picture is a small section of the Spinks Clay operation located railroad east of Gleason (geographically southeast). The large sheds covering the dry clay is characteristic of the area’s ball clay processing facilities.

This second picture is an aerial view of the Spinks facility pictured above. This aerial shot is captured from Bing maps. The old NC mainline is in the upper right of the picture and you can see the rail sidings serving this large clay processing facility.

Here’s a picture of another ball clay facility located railroad west of Gleason (northwest). This is the Old HIckory Clay Co. Also rail-served. Again you can see the very large sheds covering the white ball clay.

There are three or four of these large ball clay processors lined up along the NC mainline heading west from Gleason towards Dresden. One of them needs to be a major traffic generator for my railroad. I’m thinking of basically compressing the scene shown below in the aerial photo – it shows a clay processor and a brick plant, both rail-served even today. The brick plant is a modern facility constructed after 1960 sometime and owned by Boral Brick. It is the plant in the lower right of the photo. The clay processor is in the upper left. The NC mainline runs behind the two facilities and old TN Highway 22 runs in front of them. Of course, in 1950, that wasn’t “old” TN 22, it was the main highway.

I’m going to have to cheat a bit on prototypical accuracy to include a brick plant in Gleason circa 1950 because it appears that there was not one operating at that time. There were brick plants in the area operating before World War 2 but it appears that the last one may have closed during the 30s or early 40s – I’m still researching the details. And the Boral facility didn’t open until after the L&N acquired the NC&StL. But there were active brickworks in the area so I’m thinking of using a brickworks in Puryear TN (on the NC’s Paducah branch, between Paris TN and the Kentucky border) as inspiration for one in Gleason. With all that clay, and with brickworks being prototypically accurate in the periods both immediately before and after my modeled period, it doesn’t seem like too large a fudge.

That aerial scene above could well be an LDE all its own – two major industries, a couple of industrial sidings and a passing track. So I could have a single Gleason LDE, compressing the scene above and downtown Gleason into one LDE; or I could have two LDEs, a small-town LDE and the industrial LDE; or I could drop small town Gleason and keep the industrial scene above. Not sure exactly what I’m going to do yet – got to see what will fit and what choices I decide to make about priorities.