Jersey City Industrial Railroad Micro-Layout

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I love the site. The narrative of moving through the buildings is inspiring.

[DKS]

Glad you like it, Ed. It's been a lot of fun putting it together.

In other news, after successfully developing one little black hole into a tenement scene, I've finally settled on an approach to plug the other little black hole in the opposite corner. It's now occupied by Liberty Gas Supply. It was inspired by this historic Jersey City image:



and it fits nicely into the skyline (when the water tower is done, it'll bear a striking resemblance to the above image).

[pwnj]

Wow, tasty! Too bad there's not enough room for a little water tower, too.  Such a tempting layout plan... 

[Chris333]

His water tower would be to the left of the photo.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Hold on a sec. That gas holder would be the size of your whole layout.

[TrainCat2]

[pwnj]

Oh wait, he's going to have that water tower over at Reardon Metal. YES!!! 

[DKS]

Hold on a sec. That gas holder would be the size of your whole layout.

Quite true. Which is why the little Cornerstone job works well as a "background" structure.

[wm3798]

I like the gasworks.  I like the smaller than proto structure to suggest the gas works.  It's very model railroady, and will drive Ed batshit.  I like driving Ed batshit.

[conrailthomas519]

my thoughts are, the model size tank, in which is being used, will work out just fine. Keep up the hard work DKS!

[DKS]

I like the way Chris is modeling his grade crossings; it's appropriate for an Erie-style railroad. However... that's not the way things are done in Jersey City, so I had to devise a way of simulating the most common style of street track, which looks like this:



After considering all sorts of methods, and testing a few of them, I finally arrived at a somewhat unusual approach: clipping the head off of Code 55 rail, turning it on its side, and bonding it to the track. The hard part was finding a way of removing the head of the rail, and ultimately I settled on simply clipping it off with flush cutters. It sounds tedious, and it is, but it's not bad once you get going, and thankfully it's a small layout, so I don't have miles of track to do this way.

The first step is to remove the ties from the rails, and clip off the head (you can see the head curling up at the top of the cutters).



After a light sanding to remove any sharp edges, I straightened the rail base, then shaped it to fit in place. Using a soldering iron, I gently heat the rail just enough to get it to settle into place.



Then I apply a liberal amount of CA for the final bonding.



Modeling this kind of track means the guard rails can (should) be removed from switches, which is quite easy: they pop right off with a needle nose pliers. Also, I clip off the wings on the frogs, as these would not be present. Care must be taken to avoid having the new guard rail touch the frog; otherwise a short may result when the switch is thrown.



The final touch, of course, is to add the Belgian block; this will come in time.

[Coxy]

Neat approach. Looks good David.

[GaryHinshaw]

That's really cool David.  I wonder if code 40 on its side would work also?  It might be hard to bend and give you bigger flange ways, but save the clipping step (which isn't really that painful, as you say). 

Looking forward to seeing how you approach the blocks.

[DKS]

That's really cool David.  I wonder if code 40 on its side would work also?

Tried it. The base is only .040" wide, so it's not tall enough; it would have to be shimmed, after which there might not be enough flangeway depth.

[SkipGear]

To the earlier topic - the season.

I have a friend that is planning to model winter. His layout is large and some areas will be snow covered, some slushy, and some just bleak bare trees and ground. He has experimented on dioramas for years to get the right solution for snow. His final solution was to use marble dust. It is cheap, easy to come by and give the reflective sparkle that nothing else really could convey.

I think the hardest thing to model will be the slushy.

There is also a gentleman, Mikelhh from Australia on Trainboard that models New England in the dead of winter in HO. His results are very convincing. His photos have been in MR before in the Trackside photos section.

http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?152871-Weekend-Photo-Fun-August-23-2013&p=939836#post939836