Page 14 - March April 2017

The cold store yard (attached file 65th st pier cold store (3).JPG)
If the turnouts look a little strange they are Peco HO turnouts, a compromise/cheat to obtain the track geometry I needed. The track is by Micro-Engineering. The cold store is made from coffee stirrers mounted on foam board, the concertina doors I bought from the Gauge O Guild online shop. The building name and dock numbers are homemade decals.
The ice blocks are imitation ice cubes, made of glass. Some have been partly broken up ready to be loaded into the reefer roof hatches. I haven’t yet built the short walkways that bridge the gap between the ice rack and the car roof. The gap between the right hand end of the cold store and its generator house is now hidden by a metal industrial chimney.
Why 65th Street? Well my oldest friend in the US (we’ve been pen pals since 1963) used to live in 65th Street in Brooklyn but like many Brooklyn Italian- American families they later moved to Staten Island. The real 65th Street runs down to the west Brooklyn shore facing across to Staten Island and Bayonne (sadly the Manhattan skyline doesn’t intrude on that view and in my era the Verazzano-Narrows bridge wouldn’t be built for another 30 years). There is a water’s edge car float terminal facility at the west end of 65th Street so I fixed on that for a location. Most of my On30 modelling has been set in North Carolina in the Summer, but here by contrast I chose a late or early year cold sombre scene overlooking New York Harbour.
My future plans for the layout include developing an alternative more prototypical style of ops including adding a small fiddle yard to support that activity. Also, in 2017 I’m going to experiment with “dead rail” control, converting an 0-4-2 Porter and possibly a 2-6-0 Mogul to work the cold store using radio control and internal battery power.
Links
Inglenook http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/sw-inglenook.html
Dead Rail https://www.protocab.com/welcome
A scene on the Cheshire Branch layout as P4b Pacific #3716 of the Boston & Maine crosses the river
Photo sent by Bob Warren
14 ROUNDHOUSE April 2017