View allAll Photos Tagged ModelRailroad
Lot 955-B boxcar made from Cannon and Co sides, Branchline Despatch ends and roof, Details West cushion underframe, and Plano etched details. Paint is my custom mix of jade green and the car is finished with Microscale and Highball Graphics decals.
TT scale (1:120) model train passing through a virtual scene made from a screenshot of the computer game 'Battlefield Hardline'. The original screenshot was provided by Xanvast (www.flickr.com/photos/xanvast/).
While most of the US rolling stock pieces in my collection are of 1940s and 1960s prototypes, I recently bought some modern freight cars to be used in settings with virtual environments from computer games playing in a modern or near future world.
Northlandz Model Railroad, Flemington, NJ. First off, I don't know what the 'z' is about; it kind of makes you feel like there is some sort of hip-hop element going on, but that isn't the case. If anything, you can chalk it up as just another eccentricity of this scarcely contained interior world, the outsized thought balloon of one man and one man only, Mr. Bruce Williams Zaccagnino. (Wait...is that the 'z' connection?) Even with the following illustrated examples, it is a place several shades beyond description.
The first puzzler confronts you before you've even entered: the building which houses such grandiose displays of imagination and wonder is stark, windowless, and miserable-looking from the outside. It looks like the kind of structure that you would normally enter to buy discounted office furniture or blow-up dolls. You look at it, shiver, and think this can't possibly be the place. But it is.
When I first walked in from a dim November afternoon with my family, Zaccagnino (he is referred to as 'Mr. Williams' on the website) was just completing an effervescent romp on a gaudy, white pipe organ that threatened to brighten things up a little, but the carouselesque music felt entirely out of place - it soon became clear, for better or worse, that Mr. Williams' vision is not the most light-hearted in the world. But what an awe-inspiring vision it is, regardless of what passing gawkers happen to make of it, regardless of its eerie lighting (I swear there were no filters on my camera) and copious layers of dust. I myself became instantly hooked by it.
I'm not really much of a train person. I had a train set when I was very young, and it's easy enough for me to understand the allure of the railroad for many, because it's very similar kind of allure which roads have always held for me. Not cars. Perhaps oddly, I don't care a damn about cars. But roads and the things found alongside them always fascinated me, from the very first. My first drawings were maps of the suburban landscape in which I was driven around, the signs, the gas stations, the bridges, the route numbers and traffic lights. Growing up, I constructed a series of miniature 'cities', which were again more like suburban townscapes, adorned with elevated highways, clover-leaf interchanges, and rotating bank signs. They would always start with Lego base plates and then branch off into Lincoln Logs and random improvised pieces from other building sets around the peripheries of the spare bedroom I was lucky enough to utilize for a number of years, until my brother finally claimed it when I was in eighth grade. So in other words, while model railroads have never been my thing per se, I'm mesmerized by miniatures and small-scale layouts - or as I've come to understand in adulthood, any kind of medium which attends to or recreates close detail. And so it was that I drew an immediate and exciting connection from Northlandz back to my junior engineering days.
It wasn't just that, though. I've seen plenty of miniature layouts through the years, and while their craftsmanship always lends itself to appreciation, I'd never encountered any that didn't try to bathe their little worlds in folksy, quaint overtones, every setting hearteningly and blandly idyllic, three-dimensional equivalents of a Currier & Ives print. The creator of Northlandz, by contrast, shares my strong affinities for both realism and surrealism. Not only are there decidedly unromantic factories sprawled everywhere, but some are depicted in various stages of abandonment. Houses and theaters are boarded up here and there. There is even an entire ghost town, and not your conventionally imagined western scene at that. The entire layout is woven through a rugged geology of cliffs, canyons, and rocky grades that suggest Colorado but which could also be the anthracite and coal regions of Pennsylvania or West Virginia; the scenes among these backdrops alternate between the world of Zaccagnino's youth, where industry was more vibrant and commonplace, and the world of today where many of these industrial sites are empty and derelict. I was not in the least expecting such depictions when I originally planned my visit.
Beyond this, however, the imaginative qualities and enormous scope of this layout is nothing short of breathtaking. Even if you hurry through it, only stopping every so often to take a picture or stare bemusedly at a heaping tower of bead-sized tires or to squint at the title of a movie advertised on a minuscule mezzanine, it will take you a couple of hours to go through the entire thing. It's not just some big open space ringed with walkways: you walk through it, under it, over it, double and triple back on it, and every now and then slink through corridors which feature display windows of old radios and typewriters. Perhaps after those couple of hours certain aspects will be found repetitive, but there is always some wholly unanticipated quirk just around the next corner which compels the visitor to stop and involuntarily open her mouth in wonder. Zaccagnino's engineering chops alone are off the charts. It appears as if he couldn't be satisfied in building this behemoth unless it afforded him the most challenging set of parameters possible. There is a highly impressive array of bridges spanning the many chasms and waterways of Northlandz, no one of them the same in design or support. These, like so many of the structures, were crafted in painstaking, letter-perfect detail, and in many cases appear to be modeled after nothing actually in physical existence. There are towns on stilts, a miniature golf course in the sky, a harrowing rope bridge leading to a remote monastery, an entire amusement park, mining factories precariously and inventively perched around steep cliff walls; quotidian scenes of folks backpacking up a mountain road, laundry hanging along backyard clotheslines, random junk lying around the grounds of an old factory, plane crashes, train wrecks, scrap yards, houses undergoing demolition, even the driving of the Golden Spike. And yeah, I guess a lot of trains zipping this way and that, as well.
Northlandz is a bit out of the way if you're in based in either the Philly or New York metro areas. But whether you have kids or not, whether you like trains or not, it's well worth a gander sometime. You won't see anything like it anywhere else. It may even make you want to dump your old blocks and Legos all over the living room floor and start building something yourself.
Typ: 4achsiger Personenwagen 2. Klasse mit offenen Endplattformen, Gattung B4, Edelweiß Lokalbahn (ELB, fiktiv)
Nachbildung: Epoche 3, offene Endplattformen, Sprengwerk
Modell: H0, ohne Kurzkupplungskulisse, ohne NEM-Schacht [1, 2]
Farbgebung: Dach silbergrau, Aufbauten weiß und blau, Beschriftung und Zierlinien weiß, Drehgestelle grau
Informationen:
[1] Fleischmann Neuheiten Katalog 1967: Seite 4
[2] Fleischmann Katalog 1967/68: Seite 17
Leihgabe: MAR A360
This amazing model railroad layout is on display at the Depot Museum in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It goes the length of the building and took over 30 years to construct. The train is HO gauge.
Smallest Possible Layout
O Scale
According to the covent, this was an attempt to make the smallest possible operating O scale layout.
This is the last of the Model Trains Station photos. I hope you enjoyed them.
The N scale city of New Essen. The buildings are in their probable final position. Now we have to add the streets. A lot of streets!
Visited the Valley River Center shopping mall in Eugene today. I'm not a mall visiting person, but I wanted to see the three large model railroad layouts that were on display for three days.
Olympus Pen-F
Panasonic 42.5mm f:1.7
4 Likes on Instagram
2 Comments on Instagram:
wrenntopia_tom: Is this guy reading about the impending Beeching railway cuts ?🚂⚰
tonybeedham: Ha, probably. This line is doubtless a preserved Heritage Railway now.