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.