Nelsonville, OH: Hocking Valley Scenic Railroad Service Area

After taking pictures of the "front yard" of the HVSR, I drove on side streets until I found their "back yard." Below is the beginning of the equipment stored in their service area. The tracks fan out into a small yard and their buildings are at the end of this access road down by the bridge in the right background.

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This view is from the end of the access road. They have built a relatively new building for their day-to-day maintenance. The sides of the caboose are a very faded red (i.e. pink), so this unit must be in the process of restoration.

They take better care of their Maintenance of Way (MoW) equipment than they do of their boxcar collection. A tourist railroad needs to maintain its track to remain operational, but it doesn't really need boxcars. I saw several piles of new ties stored in their service area. And the ballast looks fresh.

Their boxcars show lots of ideas for modelers to "weather" their cars.

On the left side of the above picture, you see a sign. They left some of the rubble along the track on both sides of the sign, so it was a little tricky getting a picture of the sign.

Obviously, a couple of flatcars are carrying ties. I don't know what is on that refurbished green flatcar. Note the poling pocket on the corner. The next car in this cut is a side-dump ballast car. There are also a couple of cranes, three cabooses, a couple of passenger cars and another boxcar stored in this part of the yard.

This is a view of the same area from the other end and clearly shows that their yard has four tracks.

Since it was Easter, there was no one around so I tip-toed over their main track to get a better view of the MoW equipment.

As I went up the trail to check out the bridge over the Hocking River, I noticed another view of the yard and buildings was available from the trail. So I took a sequence of pictures from right to left.

 The long string of forlorn looking boxcars.

The MoW equipment, engine and modern maintenance building.

More MoW equipment that I could not see from the access road and an older maintenance building that was probably built by the Hocking Valley Railroad itself. You can also see the nose of a backup locomotive peaking out between the two buildings.

There was an opening at the end of the fence that allowed me to get a better shot of the older maintenance building with the skylight on top. It looks like the building went through at least two stages of expansion. I wonder if they have old machine tools (e.g. a wheel lathe) in this building, or if it is used just for storage. The HSRV used to run a steam locomotive.

When I came back from taking pictures of the bridge, I hadn't noticed the skylight before, and I had forgotten that I had already taken this view. So I waited for the couple to get past the building so that I could crop them out. But since I already have a "clean" picture of the building, I included this one for people interest and cloud changes. The woman is pushing a stroller. I sure hope the guy helps her get it over the four sets of tracks.

An apartment complex had a parking lot along some of the trail and that gave me a better view of the storage track that was furthest from the access road.

The far caboose in the above view, seen below, probably has not seen paint since 1972-1983. 1972 was when The Family Lines was created and 1983 is when it became the "CSX-Seaboard System." (1986 is when the "CSX-Seaboard System joined the Chessie System to become CSX. Playing games with railroad incorporations was not just a 19th-century activity.)