logging ops - Model Railroader Magazine

So, let's follow a log from standing on what will shortly be a stump to departing on the connecting Class 1:

1. Topped by a special crew, to get rid of the crown of branches.
2. Cut - dropped in the direction that's least likely to damage the log.
3. High-lined from the cutting side to the loadout.
4. Placed on a suitable car (pair of disconnects*, skeleton flat or ordinary floored flatcar) by a crane - often a boom on the spar tree.
5. Coupled into a train, which then runs down the logging railway to (usually) a sawmill at the end.
6. Dumped into the pond, or dry-yarded if there is no pond.
7. Processed into everything from poles, pilings and construction timber to matchsticks.
8. Loaded aboard appropriate cars (provided by the Class 1, suitable for interchange service.) and shipped out.  In some cases, raw logs with the bark still on will also be shipped to sawmills elsewhere.

In addition to running empties into the woods and loads out, the railroad had to haul everything needed for the operation - people, food, building materials (for everything from privies to bridges) and fuel (both liquid and solid.)  Potable water also had to be delivered to the camps.  Frequently this was handled in home-builds that would cause a Class 1 carknocker to faint in disbelief.

Also - loggers ran cabeese, often of equally wierd and wonderful design.

As for operation from the point of view of the DS or GM, a lot depended on the size and kind of operation.  If the line ran seventy miles into a roadless forest, with several operating sides served by branchlines and several trains on the road at once, it would be very similar to operating a similar shortline carrying coal, corn or canned goods.  If it was running one Shay on a frayed shoestring it would be very similar to a present-day `Three men and a dog,' micro-shortline.

* Disconnects, basically trucks with log bunks and couplers, were outlawed in the US, but the Kiso Forest Railway used them right up to the end of operation in 1975.  On the Kiso, there was a `rooster,' a rigid steel bar, between the coupler pockets below the logs.  Of course that rooster was just a very long, rigid link.  The Kiso used link and pin couplers right to the end.

Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with a slimmer-gauge logging feeder)