City scenery on a busy small layout
Building a finely detailed transition-era N scale railroad
Many years ago, I bought Thomas Flagg’s excellent books on New York Harbor railroads. At its peak, dozens upon dozens of pockets of activity lined the city’s waterways. These tiny scenes featured trains running down the middle of cobblestone streets, tightradius curves peeling off at 90-degree angles to dive into structures or run down piers, and an environment that just generally begs to be modeled.
In addition to the rail scene itself, there’s also the fascinating interplay with marine activity, such as tugs, car floats, and lift bridges. I quickly joined the legions that became captivated by the city’s rail-marine scene. It would be hard to imagine an area that packs more scenic interest and fascinating operations into such small, self-contained areas.
If that alone were not enough, it gets even better. Some of this activity not only still exists but is a thriving railroad on its own. New York New Jersey Rail LLC still runs car float operations, still operates out of the old New Haven Bay Ridge Yard, and even runs right down the center of First Avenue to reach a large scrap-metal recycler. It’s essentially an evolved version of the old Bush Terminal RR. The February 2018 issue of Trains magazine has a detailed article on the operation.
Because the New York harbor railroads were small and dense, they lend themselves to being modeled in a small space, even moreso if you model in N scale. At least for me, the fact that some of these operations still exist and are easily railfanned makes it even more appealing. After reading the Trains
article and making a visit to the area, I decided to take the plunge and see if there were a way to construct a miniature version of this fascinating aspect of railroading in my house.
My relatively small, L-shaped Los Angeles Junction shelf layout (Great Model Railroads 2019) nestles tightly into a corner of my home office. My desk
sits diagonally across the room in the opposite corner, leaving an open area in the middle. Ingrained in a model railroader’s DNA is the impulse to fill any empty space with a layout. After doing some rough mock-up planning, I felt confident that if I modeled in N scale, a decent representation of a New York Harbor railroad could fit there.
Freelance vs. prototype
Satisfied that I had enough room for another layout, it was time for the planning phase. For many years I would have categorized myself as a prototypical purist. Over the years, though, I’ve come to realize that the disparity between the space the real railroads occupy and how little space we have in which to build our models makes such an approach very limiting. I now take more of a protofreelance approach, where I try to capture the feel of the prototype while giving myself permission to take the liberties necessary to accommodate the realities of limited space.
The layout is based primarily on the Bush Terminal’s run down First Avenue between 39th and 65th streets, but also borrows elements from The New York Dock Railway’s Fulton Terminal.
The signature look of many of the New York Harbor railroads was a situation where the main line ran down the center of the street (single and/or double track) with leads peeling off at 90 degrees to serve the piers, float barges, and industries lining the street. With space at such a premium, they even went to such lengths as filling in portions of
the bay to make space for small, stubended yards. Finally, all my previous modeling efforts had been diesel-based, never steam, so I thought it would be fun to give that aspect a shot, too.
Track arrangements for the New York Harbor railways, including Bush and
Fulton Terminal, are very well documented in print, so I relied on them as a rough guide. As the layout progressed, I realized I had more than enough track to keep me busy, so further design iterations involved trimming as opposed to adding more track.
Photography standards
I enjoy close-up photography, and there are some aspects of N scale that, if not addressed, stick out like a sore thumb when the camera zooms in. Since most N scale rolling stock comes with truck-mounted couplers, the cars ride higher to accommodate coupler swing. The couplers themselves are also oversized. I body-mounted Z scale couplers to all cars and snipped off the trip pins. When Atlas acquired BLMA, they picked up their fine scale trucks (BLMA 9045) which, in addition to having a narrower tread width, also lower the car back to its correct height.
Finally, code 55 rail, which looks fine at a normal viewing distance, takes on an oversized look in images. To overcome these challenges I used code 40 rail
on track that wasn’t embedded in the street. (See “Street track” at right.) This required hand-laying all the non-streettrack turnouts.
I used Micro Engineering code 40 on these parts of the layout. Deeper flanged locomotives tend to “hop” on the spikes of code 40 flex track. A few light passes over the inside spikes with a riffler file solved that problem.
There are no free lunches, however, and going the fine-detail route in N comes at a price. That cost is the extra labor needed to maintain reliable operating performance. Because of the smaller wheel-to-rail contact area, N scale is much more finicky than the larger scales, and even moreso when you employ smaller rail.
There are some things you can do to at least partially compensate for these issues. All my turnout frogs are powered by Tam Valley frog juicers. I add substantial weight to all of the freight cars, and I clean the rail much more often that I would on my HO layouts. Finally, I’ve found that N scale runs more reliably if you operate it frequently.
Operations
Designing for N scale operations can be misleading because it’s easy to underestimate how long it takes a locomotive to go from point A to point B at switching speeds. Even small layouts such as this can take quite a while to work, even without complex switching maneuvers. Simply unloading the car float and getting the cars to the yard and organized takes well over a half an hour.
I’ll often leave an operating session at that. If I want to run longer, I generally think of things in terms of two districts. I’ll either work the three warehouses along the pier or the industries along 1st Avenue, but usually not both.
Lance Mindheim is a frequent contributor to Model Railroader and its special issues. He’s the owner of The Shelf Layouts Co. (www.shelflayouts.com), a custom layout building and design firm.