Reopening The Oak Hill Branch

During the rewiring project, I wound up having to move a lot of stuff aside, and because it was convenient, a lot of it got put into the area where the Oak Hill Branch is located.

Naturally, I've got to clean a lot of this off. At the same time, I decided to make things a little easier to operate by installing a Throttle Pocket on the fascia:

Throttle Pockets or equivalent have some real advantages. They keep the scenery a little more protected by providing a definite place to put the throttle. They also make it a little less likely that the throttle will be knocked off the layout and be damaged.

Although the Eastern Division, Zenith Sub main line was converted to DCC stationary decoders, the Oak Hill Branch is keeping toggles to control Tortoise switch machines:

I had to do track cleaning and re-railing of equipment:

My Bachmann Interstate RS-3 is a regular on the Oak Hill Branch. I used it do to the switching work involved with repositioning the cars:

There's still work to do, but at least I can now run a train to serve the mine: