West of Hinton

The New River Gorge is west of Hinton and a gentle grade against eastbounds.  No helpers needed.

Scott Chatfield 

The War made the line VERY

The War made the line VERY busy.  In the North the C&O controlled the PM that ran in Michigan and thus Detroit.

In the South it ran into Newport News a major port vacility.

But as not the New River Gorge area Runs (Give or take) From Handley to Hinton.  And was relatively gentle.  East of Hinton Helpers were used over the  Mountains.   But in the gorge it was not needed.  In part because the graders were less, but these lesser grades meant that trains ran faster so you could move more trains over the line in a give time.  So some trains were ran as multiple sections. 
 

In either case West if Hinton (where I model) was not helper territory.  But it did get the big fright engines (often put on East Bound fright trains at Handley)  So the mighty H8, 2-6-6-6s and the older H7 2-8-8-2s as well as the new 2-8-4s.    The Passenger trains under normal conditions would swap out the flat engines for the mountain engines (such as 4-8-4s) in Hinton.  So in effect my area i model sees Big freight engines but no passengers and smaller passenger engines.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule but a general practice.  
The area I model would see a lot of 2-8-2 and 2-6-6-2s on local coal trains and such.

So no helper service for me until I hit lotto and build an audition to model Hinton to Clifton Forge

-Doug M

Limited by grades - and passing sidings

C&O, like many other roads was limited by passing siding length. Increasing the length of trains was sometimes impractical because it was hard to work around such trains. Although there were obvious exceptions, C&O coal was generally limited to 160 cars. Some divisions (such as the Mountain Sub between Charlottesville and Clifton Forge) were limited to around half that, with the result that coal almost never went on the Mountain. Of course there was also the "minor" problem of the steep grades (triple that of the actual ruling grades!) but even empties couldn't go back via the Mountain. The practical impact is that when traffic increased, the trains didn't get longer, there were just more of them.

Some areas, such as the James River Sub, were already mostly downhill and were not power limited. In fact, the James River handled 160-car coal trains that came in to Clifton Forge with a single 2-8-2, even though the gradients were such that a pair of 2-6-6-6's were needed to get the train to the division point.

There were some other considerations too, such as distance from road crossings. A mile long train at 5mph takes 12 minutes to clear a grade crossing. The railroad was very conscious of blocking grade crossings for long periods of time, even outside of the urban areas.

Of course, on the Allegheny Sub, the rule was a pusher and trains leaving without a helper were scarce indeed, even when provided with the biggest of power. There were a few other notable helper districts. The Limeville Bridge over the Ohio had a 2-8-8-2 pretty much permanently stationed there as a pusher. Less known but no less common was the 3-mile pusher district heading east out of Richmond, where loaded trains had to start on a nearly-ruling grade to get out of town. Since this started literally at the yard limits, C&O used whatever was on hand as a pusher, including at least one documented instance of a coal train taking not one but two 0-8-0's pushing a train out of town.

Just to be clear I was

Just to be clear I was referring to Mountains as a generic term I was not referring to the Mountain Subdivision…

As. Mountain vs River.  
 

-Doug