Page 6 - May June 2020

Evelyn Harbor Portable Layout
Graham Elliott
A Jersey Central Fairbanks Morse pulling empty covered grain hoppers out of Hudson Grain - photos by Graham Elliott
N SCALE LAYOUT
S ince I prefer freight movements the width would be 12 inches (it
with a variety of rail cars in dif- ferent liveries, the USA attracts me, also for the predominance
of single track routes. So I have to rely on magazines, books and the internet
to inform me about some aspects of American railways. I have visited the USA but all these visits were before I thought about building the layout I’m going on to describe. I came across articles about the railroads serving the City of New York with the use of rail car floats across the Hudson River. Since I think my exper- tise is better in layout planning, building baseboards and structures (rather than scenery with rocks, rivers and vegeta- tion), a harbor layout beckoned.
I’ve applied the UK
model railway Rule One: ‘It’s my railway’!
So I decided I would build the layout with operation from the front just for myself in N scale. Also it would be portable so that if I ever moved house it could be a stand alone shelf layout, or part of a more extensive layout. Hence
actually increased to 13 inches), and in 3ft modules for lightness and ease of movement. In total there would be four modules of which one would be for staging thus a total of linear 12 feet.Two modules would be the harbor and industries around it, and one module the town backdrop with an engine shed and turntable in front. For portability two boards are joined together.
A number of railroads were built to
the waterfront of New Jersey for their car floats to transport rail cars to New York City. Atlas have produced a GP7
in the Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) livery (dark green and yellow). So I decided my layout would be a fictional terminal of the CNJ but set in the 1970s when Conrail had just been created from a number of failed railroads, giving me the opportunity of having several railroad liveries on the layout.
The layout represents the New Jersey side depicting the area where the car floats coming from New York City dock into the lifting bridge. So in effect the car
A CNJ GP9 in blue livery (for proposed Conrail amalgamation) on the branch passenger train
float is a removable ‘staging yard’ bring- ing rail cars onto the layout.These cars are then taken off the barge, formed into a train and driven through the industry and town boards onto the end staging board which represents the rest of the USA.
Now it’s built and I’ve moved house with it, it’s located semi-permanently in the room above my double detached garage.
Evelyn Harbor now operates as a branch meeting a junction (fed by a fiddle yard behind Evelyn) which is next to a food factory and an LPG depot, before enter-
ROUNDHOUSE - May/June 2020
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