Goals of the Layout

1. It's funny, but whenever you read articles about model railroading or talk to model railroaders they tell you about the goals of their layout. What were they trying to accomplish during the design and building phases of the layout. Chances are that if you are reading this you already know about layout goals, so I won't waste time explaining them. Instead I will explain here the things I would find, in order of importance, essential to the success of the New York Harbor Model RR project:The lay out has to have a very strong operational component. When all is said and done, when the track is laid and the buildings are glued down and the paint is dry we are going to want to operate the railroad and not play with trains. We are going to shuttle railroad cars and cargo across the East River in New York.
2. Despite the space and scale limitations I want this layout to look cool. The waterfront with piers and docks will represent the foreground. This is where all the railroading activity will take place. A docked ocean going freighter will be the focal point of the layout (more about that later.) The dock front warehouses, behind which we will have tall building flats and a cityscape (possibly) painted backdrop.
3. Part of the operational element is automatic railroading activity. This is made possible with DCC. The idea is that periodically some construct will move onto the scene, and you (the local engineer) have to be sure you are of the main line (as far as you would have a mainline on an industrial railroad)
4. Even though it does not exist in actuality I have been kicking around the idea of putting in an elevated train (NY EL train) that runs automatically behind the warehouse buildings. You would be able to see these trains as they passed over the cross streets. The elevated road bed is made of those beautiful laser cut jobs. 

   

   Photograph of the Fulton Harbor RR (*1)

   
5. Because I was really enamored by the little saddle tank engine I will probably end up modeling the turn of the century (I'll have to check on that to be more precise) even though I think that the N scale cars and truck available for the 1950s would make an excellent addition to the layout. Unfortunately they would not (for obvious reasons) go with the 1900's time period. 
6. I would like to get my feet wet laying my owned track and building switches. The NYD railroad lends itself beautifully to this idea. First the Car Floats will be built from scratch, probably a piece of wood to start with (nice and heavy), on which the tracks will be laid by hand of course. In addition the float bridge leading up to the car float has a cut switch, (the switch starts on the bridge, and continues on the car float) which will have to be hand laid. Finally there is a section in the prototype where several tracks cross each other in a very confined space (see photo.) I have seen people do that kind of stuff and I think it is so cool. So I would like to incorporate that as well.

And that will be it for tonight. I will probably re-read this in the morning, make some revisions and periodically come back to it to see if I sufficiently captured the vision my layout. So count on seeing some changes over time as I figure out what the real priorities of the layout are.

*1 Photo is used with permission from the author of the Yew York Dock website.  The original photo was located online in the Life Magazine archives and was taken in 1943. This photograph was part of a series of three all of which pertain to the Fulton Terminal.  http://www.trainweb.org/bedt/indloco/nyd.html

The New York Dock Fulton Terminal, the true source and inspiration

Fulton Terminal 1966 (Unknown Photographer)

I may have been inspired by the June 2010 Model Railroader article entitled "Working the harbor on the New York Central", but I got really excited when I came across this websitehttp://www.freightrrofnyc.info/ which contained so much information and pictures that I nearly completed my initial research in a single day.

Slight note of caution: the above page is huge and older computers, like mine, suffer near nuclear melt-downs when loading the voluminous  amount of information.  Fortunately Firefox seems to be dealing better with this website.  

 The Web site's author Philip Goldstein did an amazing job gathering the pictures and information and then compiling them into a central location. The main website: http://www.freightrrofnyc.info/ officially covers Industrial and Offline terminal Railroads of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx and Manhattan. I was impressed and sold at the same time. Besides the pictures the author provided access to maps, a valuable tool when planning a layout. A portion of the map that will provide the foundation of my layout is in the header of this blog. Thank you Philip for your tireless efforts in gathering these materials and making them available.

So why the New York Dock (NYD) and not some other railroad? That is a good question indeed, and let me tell you I did have to go through a lot of material to be sure that the NYD was in fact the one for me. As I mentioned in my previous post, the amount of space I had available in my basement was roughly 12' by 1'. Not a lot of room for a layout, and it is in a straight line to boot. This of course seriously detracts from the excitement and wow factor that you often experience when you walk into one of those 30' x 40' plus layouts. You know the ones that are featured on the glossy pages of Model Railroader magazine with peninsulas and long sweeping stretches of main line galore. So right from the start I was looking for something with a linear feel to it, something I could stick against a wall and that with a little creative use of paints and building "flats" would still have depth and character. This is also where I decided that I would go with N scale (1:160) for it would allow me to get the greatest bang, space wise, for the buck. I think in all honesty that modeling HO on a 1' shelf would be beyond challenging.

Introduction

"Why a(nother) blog about a model train?" you ask. The answer is simple, it's for me. But if you like model trains you may enjoy this ramble about setting up a model train themed after a New York Harbor car float operation. I have been thinking about building this, my second, layout for a year now, and even though the budget is substantially non-existent, I figured it is time to formalize the planning process. Hence this blog.

Why model a New York Harbor car float operation? Perhaps I should explain what a car float is. A car float is a barge with two or three sets of tracks on it. This barge is loaded with railroad cars at a yard on one side of a harbor, and pulled with a harbor tug to the other side, where the cars are unloaded and the process is repeated for the voyage back. Before the days that bridges were capable of handling the weight of loaded railroad cars trains were shunted across the harbor using these barges.

In model railroading operations the modeler sometimes employs cassettes, or long wooden trays with tracks that can be hooked on to a spur in the railroad to simulate the idea of cars or train constructs moving on and of the railroad jurisdiction. It is kind of like a mobile staging yard. This idea has fascinated me for a long time. I have been planning a layout for a ridiculously long time, and I can tell you that every plan involved elaborate staging to simulate the movement of trains and cars to locations other than modeled on the layout.

And so it was that when I read "Working the harbor on the New York Central" by Lloyd Miller in the June 2010 issue of the Model Railroader magazine I knew what I wanted to do. By then I had already decided that I would build this layout in my basement, a 9' by 18' area that I share with my son Patrick's Xbox, and our combined computer. My wife, Debbie has her own computer upstairs. Space down here is a precious commodity but I figured we could probably live with a 1' shelf, 12' long and since Patrick marginally shares my interest in trains, he won't mind.

So here it goes. I hope to share my plans, sources and any ideas. I am also using this subject to familiarize myself with the fundamentals of blogging, but foremost I would like this to be an interesting experience to you the reader.