There are a number of model railroad clubs in the Delaware Valley and this time of year they open their clubhouses for the public to view their layouts. In addition, a handful of people open up their private, in-home layouts to the public, and some of these rival the club layouts. I’m a model and toy train enthusiast and have been for years. While engaged to be married but with nothing to furnish a new household I wrote to my bride-to-be from my base in Europe that I could get some great bargains in German and Austrian-made HO trains over there. Imagine her enthusiasm.
I’ve been travelling around to some of the club and private layouts and it has been fun. Here are scenes from two of the private layouts. Photography was difficult; there were too many visitors and the aisles were too narrow to permit using a tripod. So, using available light at the necessarily slow speed and hand-held shooting results in some slightly fuzzy pictures. On the left is a scene from the Rancocas Valley Lines layout in Cinnaminson NJ. On the right is a scene from the Patcong Valley Model Railroad Club in Richland NJ, as are the bottom two scenes. Both layouts have open houses on the coming weekends. For details click on their highlighted names above.
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The level of detail and realism is impressive. There are typically three to five trains running at once on a layout, each under the control of an engineer, with overall control by a dispatcher who oversees the whole railroad, assigning routes to each engineer. The engineers walk alongside or near their trains and control them with handheld controllers which may be wireless or may plug into the layout fascia here and there.
Below are two pictures of a layout built by a friend of mine. This layout is more in the tradition of old-time Christmas toy train layouts, particularly with the use of German-Swiss-Austrian style buildings.
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January 23, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Ralph—The pictures are fantastic. All these years of living around the corner from the Cinnaminson exhibit and never went in. Now I will – thanks for the preview.
Your train exhibit is absolutely awesome!!
Keep sending the pics.
Ellen
January 23, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Thanks, Ellen, – enjoy. Missed seeing you this fall. Oh, well. Off-again, off-again.
February 1, 2010 at 11:14 pm
My brother, Jack Burns, was a railroad enthusiast and spent many happy hours creating his in-home layout. It all started when he received a Lionel train as a child.
M
February 22, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Great photo’s some look so realistic, hard to believe they are photographs.
December 20, 2010 at 9:43 pm
Hi Ralph, I jst webt to view your RR pics and they won’t load. Just thought you might like to know. Let me know if they get fixed I would like to see the layout. FYI, I use to be a locomotive engineer and both Sue and I have been interested in model RR for quite some time.
December 21, 2010 at 11:18 am
Thanks, Vince. I started to update that privately hosted blog last fall, and had to download a new version of WordPress, and that required a new version of MySQL, and the newer WP release required a new theme, and I never did get things working before I had to turn away to other projects. Next year.
January 11, 2019 at 6:26 am
Gorgeous photos. We had recently an exhibition of
Alpine model railway exhibition
Shooting photos was not easy. My wife took as good photos as I with her smart photo. I think that it is interesting to compare them.
Have a nice day!
January 11, 2019 at 5:30 pm
Thanks for visiting. I enjoyed your work also. Seven years ago I moved to a retirement community. Before that I had two layouts in my basement, one Lionel three rail and one HO. Pictures are at http://www.pbase.com/bergiesplace/mylayouts.
I am now reduced to a 4×6 Christmas layout, all with Faller kit buildings. I am fond of the Bavarian, Swiss and Austrian old architecture as you can see. There is another view here: https://bergiesplace.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/christmas-scenes-at-bergiesplace/ The buildings in the Lionel layout are all American architecture, in porcelain, and offered as “Snow Village” by Department 56.
Once again, Hyvää uutta vuotta
January 12, 2019 at 2:05 am
I visited Your links and love them.