Hi,

An excellent book about the Silverton Railroad is The Rainbow Route. It goes into all of Otto Mear's lines out of Silverton and has an excellent explanation of how the Corkscrew Gultch turntable and approach tracks were graded to get it to work.

Basically, both lead tracks to the turntable had a short downhill grade to the turntable. Once the loco passed through the turntable, the cars were allowed to coast downhill onto the turntable using hand brakes and then the loco could come back and couple on to the other end of the car string.

Doug vV

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