The Southern Ry. listed both the westbound and eastbound schedules from Spencer to Asheville, so the eastbound schedule reads up. All of the usual things are here, milepost numbers, station numbers, lengths of sidings and other tracks, station facilities (X: yard limits, B: scale, O: fuel oil, W: water, Y: wye track), station names, telephones (P), and operator hours (N: continuous, D: daytime, NC: non-continuous, more than just daytime, but not around the clock). The daytime stations were often Monday - Friday or Monday - Saturday. The track diagram showed the number of tracks. Solid lines were ABS signals, dotted lines were CTC/Remote Control. See my post Givens & Druthers II - The Prototype. I just included the schedules as far as Hickory, since that will be the end of the modeled railroad.
The Southern Ry. elected not to join Amtrak when it was created in 1971 and continued to run its own passenger trains. By 1974, the Asheville Special (trains 3 & 4) was all that was left of the Carolina Special, which ran from Cincinnati to Asheville, before splitting into North Carolina and South Carolina sections, and then from Asheville to Barber, north to Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Raleigh, and finally to Morehead City. The Asheville Special made connections with the Piedmont in Salisbury. The usual consist was an FP7, the coach-baggage combine Fort Mitchell, formerly of the Central of Georgia, and an ex-Wabash dome coach. The Asheville Special was discontinued in 1975, followed shortly by the Piedmont. The operation of the Cresent was turned over to Amtrak in 1979.
Trains 223 and 224 were the rail-hiway trains, operating between Spencer and Harriman Jct., TN, with connections to Cincinnati and East St. Louis. Westbound No 223 was scheduled to make a pick-up in Hickory. There was a small piggy-back terminal between Oyama and Conover. That site is used for storing covered hoppers now. No 224 ran through without making any stops. Any eastbound piggy-back traffic was handled by freight trains and made connections in Spencer. Trains 256 and 257 were the Catawba Coal Train. This unit train ran to Duke Power's Marshall Steam Plant in Terrell, NC. It used the "Siverside" aluminum coal gondolas and radio controlled mid-train helpers. This plant was also served by the SCL, so the frequency of service depended on where Duke Power was buying its coal.
Westbound train No 163 was the hottest of the eight freight trains. It was listed as first class, and made an important connection in Barber. No 163 would take westbound cars of cigarettes from Winston-Salem to Charlotte train no 131, as well as other high priority freight. A conversation with a former operator at Barber reveled that these cars and the door seals were inspected by a Southern Ry. special agent whenever the train stopped. In contrast to No 163, trains 147 and 148 were the all stops trains that stopped wherever work needed to be done and delivered and picked up cars at Statesville, Marion, and Morganton.
While these trains have schedules in the employee timetable, that does not mean that they ran close to these times. According to a 1979 schedule of freight trains for the whole system, No 163 was due out of Spencer at 11:00 p.m., compared to a timetable schedule of 10:30. The 11:00 time at Barber was optimistic, and it was due out about 2:00 a.m. The Timetable schedule had No 163 in Asheville at 4:00 a.m., but the system timetable time was five hours later at 9:00 a.m. The other trains has similar relationships between the two documents. The schedule in the employee timetable was to facilitate the efficient movement of traffic over the line and was not the times when the trains were expected.
Trains 166 and 167 ran between Charlotte and Knoxville, and came up the O-Line (ex. AT&O) through Mooresville. They operated between Charlotte and Statesville as trains 129 and 130. I recall seeing a newspaper article from near this time that said these trains could run up to 200 cars. The locals, trains 60 and 61, ran from Spencer to Morganton one day, and back the next and would meet somewhere in the middle I don't know if they swapped crews or if all of the crews were based in Salisbury. The other locals, 87 and 88, ran as a turn from Asheville to Marion and back. Until the wood chipping plant was built at Bridgewater in the 1980s, there were no customers to serve between Morganton and Marion.
Trains 131 and 132, not shown on these pages, ran between Charlotte and Winston-Salem. They were both first class trains, and while 132 would normally be superior by direction, there is a note in the timetable, "No. 131 is superior to No. 132, Winston Salem to Barber." In fact, both of these trains and Train 163 would all be in Barber at the same time. Trains 131 and 132 would swap engines and crews, with the W-S engines returning there and the Charlotte engines and crews going back to Charlotte. There was nowhere else along this line with a siding large enough for these trains to meet and both would handle local work along the way.
Train operation changed greatly after the new computerized hump yard, named Spencer Yard, was built in Linwood, NC, in 1979. All of the branch line trains, 129, 130, 131, and 132, were dropped. It was then less expensive to send everything to the new Spencer Yard, shove it over the hump, and send it back out from there. A fourth wye track was added to Barber, allowing the Spencer Yard to Winston Salem trains to run through Barber, which was shorter than going through Greensboro, but that also ceased when a bridge on that line near Winston Salem was condemned and not replaced.
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