If you live in an apartment or otherwise find your model railroad space limited, take heart brother, there is somewhere a prototype to meet your needs. This one can be modeled on a table top!
Railroad Model Craftsman, February 1950
The idea to build a model railroad layout centered around the Harlem River evolved gradually. I started model railroading two years ago, when my dad moved out from his house and I packed up his N scale layout he built in the 1990ies. His layout disappeared in storage but I kept a few locomotives, some passenger and freight cars as well as some sectional Minitrix track. His rolling stock was fairly old, lacked DCC and was not running smoothly anymore. Soon, I would buy new material on my own. I began working on a modular dog-bone kind of layout using mostly sectional Code 80 track.
A year later I ended up having 4 modules that connected would give me a 3 by 12-foot layout. Except, there was no place large enough in our Manhattan apartment to integrate all modules at once. Let alone to keep them in place for a few days. It became soon clear to me that I had ended up in a dead-end and that I needed a different approach for my hobby.
Tim Warris’ Bronx Terminal
While designing the last of my modules I chose a layout that could no longer be laid with sectional track. To make it work, I had to build my own turnouts and to connect them with flex track. While evaluating the different options for hand laid track and hand built turnouts I came across Tim Warris’ Fast Tracks website, his stunning blog on the CNJ (Central Railroad of New Jersey) Bronx Terminal. Tim’s site led me to Philip M. Goldstein’s web page on the CNJ Bronx Terminal. I was fascinated from the beginning. And hey, living in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it was almost in my neighborhood! It took me a while, though, to convince myself that this freight yard – which unfortunately disappeared in the 1960ies – could be something worth modeling. I could find only few references of modelers who built the Bronx Terminal apart from Tim Warris. Furthermore, most of the material I found pointed to HO scale models. Being a N scale modeler it would have to be in N scale. The beauty of it was, however, that it was a self-contained well documented freight yard, one of the several pocket terminals in the Bronx. As a model, it would be small enough to fit into our apartment, and it had enough challenges to keep me busy with my hobby for a while. And if I’d ever complete the CNJ Bronx Terminal it could be extended as the Harlem River provides enough prototypical material for more model railroading.
Complex Track Work
Before I convinced myself that I should model the CNJ Bronx Terminal I wanted to be sure that N scale hand laid track work would be feasible for me. Having built a few turnouts using Fast Tracks’ great tools and instructions, I knew that simple #6 turnouts were straightforward to do. This project was more than just a bunch of turnouts, though.
The tracks are all organized around an inner oval concentric to the circular freight house and an outside run-around track (literally!) from which would run 14 spurs used as team tracks towards the East side. The NW corner has a triple diamond crossing with two tracks leading to a transfer bridge in the Harlem River, and the spur tracks on the East side are all connected to the outer track by 3-way turnouts. The icing on the cake is a wye-shaped quadruple diamond crossing between the fourth and fifth pair of tracks. Very few of the turnouts follow a standard so Fast Tracks’ fixtures cannot be used (their templates may help, though).
To reassure myself, I built a simple 45-degrees crossing. It worked much better than expected, looked great and was fully functional from the beginning. My decision was taken, I’d build a 1:160 scale copy of the CNJ Bronx Terminal without any selective compression.
