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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.
Pennsy T1 5516 heads up the express on a beautiful morning
Model Trains Step by Step. The complete Model Trains step by step guide - over 100 pages of instruction with color illustrations, photos and videos. dld.bz/railroadingtricks
My toy from the 1960s. Had loads of fun with my trainset.
I can remember when I painted it, must have been 6-7 years old, to look dirty and adding the NSB (Norwegian) logo.
Zeb's last opening was at a place that used to be a warehouse that is now home to a model train building shop. Zeb's photos were awesome, but so were the trains. And so were the people who came to run and watch the trains. They take these trains very seriously. I loved watching the little kids who would literally run right along side the trains as they rounded the track. Zeb pointed out later that is wasn't only the kids following the trains around. All in all a pretty cool experience.
This was an 8 minute exposure taken with my pinhole a few mornings before the opening. This train was not running, obviously. The guy who worked there was running another train at the time, which Zeb and Owen were following around.
David Lee of Dundas, Canada spent 50 years making this elaborate model train set in his basement to 1/87th scale.
In 2017, it was moved to the McMaster University Health Sciences building at Bay St. and Main St. in downtown Hamilton.
Sadly David Lee died on January 22, 2019.
Marklin 37121 - NS 1215 + Marklin 37122 - ACTS 1251 + Marklin 37129 - EETC 1251 + Roco 79835 - Railpromo 1215
HO Scale tucks and people. The man is 3/4 " tall. I collect HO Scale cars, trucks and train stuff from Europe. Macro is the best way to photograph them.
Pulled by the speeding blurred locomotive. Set up every Christmas by nearby neighbors. iPhone 8+ photo.
After the train ride, all passengers were allowed free admission into the model train museum... which had a pretty incredible set up. A massive display with tunnels and buildings of all sorts, and which (someone said) cost $200,000 to put together.
The model wascreated with information supplied by the Archives. Alan LePain photo. Digital image made from photograph in Boston & Maine Railroad Historical Society Archives. Learn more about the B&MRRHS at www.bmrrhs.org. Photo 428
Alan, a master draftsman, created the plans for the tower, expertly executed by Jimi. Digital image made from photograph in Boston & Maine Railroad Historical Society Archives. Photo 429
N scale layout "Lackawanna Junction" Custom Project. A new movie for this layout will be up on my Youtube next week.
New projects coming all through next year...
Big City Layout in Nscale. Any city USA
Floor to ceiling logging layout in Nscale & Zscale. Will stand six feet tall. With scenery starting at six inches from the floor.
HO: Amusement park layout with functioning attractions.
Nscale: Round turning layout that slowly spins as the trains travel through cities, deserts, and forests.
Two new videos coming to Youtube in November! One a really cool custom project, and the other will be for Sale on Ebay.
a mysterious scrapbook given to me by Flickrer What Makes the Pie Shops Tick?; nearly everything in it is about model trains!