New York City Streetcars in N Scale!
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by John Wright
Some years ago, I was living in a small apartment in Brooklyn and only had room for a small shelf layout in N scale, depicting a New York harbor waterfront railroad. Tight curves, street running and urban scenery, plus a growing interest in New York City streetcar history, led me into traction modeling in N scale. At the time, I was only aware of the Bachmann PCC and Brill trolleys—oversize and rough runners but cheap and easy to upgrade and kitbash. After seeing the N scale Ttrak based modules of Phillip Cook and the Hyland family at a Rutgers model transit meet, I wanted to build some modules of my own. One scene that came to mind was a long vanished Brooklyn trolley landmark a few blocks from my apartment—the cut and tunnel that took the Church Avenue line under Ocean Parkway. A three foot long model of this scene plus a couple of balloon loop modules and I was a traction mogul, setting up and running at train shows! 3D printing is a real boon for N scale and I have a couple of Brooklyn 8000 Peter Witts and an air-electric PCC from GHB via Shapeways, both shown in the next photograph.
Two GHB 3D printed Brooklyn cars at Church Avenue and Ocean Parkway!
A move to Michigan five years ago took me away from my source of inspiration but also brought me in touch with the Detroit United Railway model traction club, a group that's been around since the mid 1950s. Despite the magnifying glass jokes about N scale, they're a great crew of mostly HO and O modelers that sets up HO modules at local train shows and travels to traction meets. We even have a couple of N scalers and I have learned a lot about traction modeling and enjoy the comradeship of monthly meetings and road trips to shows and trolley museums.
One thing I like about N scale traction is the ability to capture large scenes in a small space. Besides the Ocean Parkway module, I've built modules of the railroad ferry terminals at 23rd Street on the Hudson in Manhattan, a “plow pit” where Manhattan trolleys changed from underground conduit power to overhead wire, and a Brooklyn waterfront scene that recycles some of my old rail/marine watercraft. While I do some compression, these scenes are not far from true 1:160.
Action at the Plow Pit
as Bronx bound conduit cars switch to overhead wire!
I enjoy fabricating trackwork, streets and buildings but love to build Third Avenue Railway, New York Railways, Brooklyn and other NYC streetcars, especially after discovering reliable, inexpensive scale drives from manufacturers in Japan. N scale traction is very popular in Japan, with makers like Kato, Tomix and others turning out dozens of Japanese trams in different paint schemes. Most of these models never see the light of day in the U.S. but can be easily mail ordered from Japan. My go-to chassis is the Tomytec TM-TR01, a double truck chassis that is perfect for any number of NYC trolleys and can even be adjusted to three different lengths. They're under $30 and are great runners with a flywheel. I cut up the frames, add weight, passengers to hide the motor and flywheel, and they still run for hours at a train show.
Queensborough Bridge trolleys were the last trolleys to run in New York City in 1957.
Of course that chassis needs something to ride on top of it, so I've been using a number of methods to make N scale streetcars. Pieces of Bachmann Brill kitbash nicely into TARS and New York Railways deck roof cars, and I've also scratchbuilt bodies from styrene and brass. A Czech maker called Modely Tramvaji has brass etchings for the Vienna Type Z streetcars that came from TARS, and I built up one into a conduit powered 600 car and kitbashed another set into a center door Huffliner.
TARS Cars from Modely Tramvaji etchings. The center door Huffliner took a lot of kitbashing!
23rd Street Railroad Ferry Terminals - Two kitbashed cars with cut down Bachmann Brill Sides and Roofs with scratch built ends!
Although it's 1:150 scale and doesn't exactly fit the scenes I'm modeling, I can't resist the well-made ready to run Japanese trams. Some of the older models are not that different from North American trolleys and the modern trams look like the shovel nosed streetcars appearing in more American cities every year. As much as I love historical accuracy and trying to get the New York period details right, I'll always give plenty of train show running time to my Kato Centram, a showstopper with LED lights and snaky articulation. Tomix makes a triple articulated tram that's in the ballpark for the Brookville cars planned for Detroit's new Woodward Avenue streetcar line, so when they settle on a paint scheme I'll get out the airbrush.
I still haven't taken the plunge of live overhead, although many others have done this in N scale. Many of my cars are Manhattan conduit powered so I would still need two rail power to run them. For now it's just two rail DC but I hope to get my electronics skills into the 21st century. While I want to get an HO DCC powered car to run on club modules, and enjoy my small G gauge garden railway, I've had a lot of fun with N scale traction in recent years and think it could be a real growth area in the hobby. The small size isn't really a problem when reliable cars and street trackage are available RTR from Japan and this could be the entry level “train set” that breaks through the steep learning curve associated with traction modeling and gives new modelers something similar to the prototypes they're seeing in major American cities. I hope I can inspire others to give N scale traction a try, whether with out of the box instant gratification or the challenge of prototype scenes and intricate scratchbuilding.
About the author: John grew up in Louisiana and has early memories of riding the Saint Charles streetcar line in New Orleans. He is a lifetime model railroader but a latecomer to traction modeling. Along the way he has been a writer, English teacher, stonemason and garden designer. He currently is living in Livonia, Michigan with his wife and son.
Ed: John provided some of theses photos to Custom Traxx a few weeks ago and they were so impressed with the quality of the modeling that they passed them to the Southern California Traction Club (SCTC). But the detail in those photos made it hard to accept that this was N scale to most of the club members. The SCTC, an HO scale club founded in 1995, was so impressed by the photos that they investigated N scale and as result recently expanded into N scale to model push-pull commuter trains. They are using a lot of the Kato Unitrack and Unitram items along with some of the Japanese equipment mentioned in this article along with some out of production Athearn Bombardier commuter cars, provided by Joe Delia of A-line / ProtoPower West. Reports from the club are indicating that this smaller scale is much more enjoyable than predicted once they learned some of the differences that are required due to the smaller sizes of everything.
