Army base/naval base - Model Railroader Magazine

On the United State Naval Air Station Tidelands (Lighter than Air) Railroad [abbreviated as the "lighter than air railroad"], the one-base switcher takes delivery of

HELIUM in specially-designed helium tankcars, for blimps.  Several of the prototype cars have been preserved in museums; a mass-produced N scale model was once available, and a limited-edition craftsman kit in HO.

AVIATION GASOLINE and other petroleum products.  A Navy blimp pilot with whom I did an "oral history" for my layout told me the blimps used the same engines as airplanes, and burned the same high-test fuel.  My fuel-dump is based on photos from a Naval Air Station base yearbook from the 1950s.

MUNITIONS.  The Navy had special boxcars for handling explosives, depth charges etc.  The Navy had the ONLY 50' PS-1 boxcars built with 1-and-a-half doors.  In N, they can be kitbashed from the MicroTrains 50' Single-door PS-1 with some door-bashing.

COAL has already been mentioned.

An aerial photograph of the Hitchcock Naval Air Station (LTA) on which my layout is (loosely) based, in the book Naval Air Stations of World War II the volume covering western US, has an aerial photograph clearly showing the mile long spur from the Santa Fe mainline onto the base.  One track ran right through the blimp hanger, down its center line.

NAS Corpus Christi had a railroad some 10 miles long built to connect it with the Texas Mexican Rwy just west of Corpus Christi (outside the city when the base was built just before WWII).  During the 1960s, the base had one or two of its own on-base switchers operated by its own crews.  They gave rides on them to civilians during the Navy Relief Festival charity fund activity.  The railroad was leased to the TexMex at one time.  About 1970, the trackage on the base was abandoned but the remainder of the line used to service commercial rail customers that had grown up along the rail spur-- a concrete ready-mix plant, lumber yards, retail store warehouse.  About 1990, nearly all the line was ripped up, except for a few hundred feet adjacent to the TexMex yard used for car storage and a local grain elevator.

My Navy blimp base layout: blimp's eye view

Details showing traffic

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