Grand Scale Freight Yard Aspirations

Discuss park gauge trains and large scale miniature railways having track gauges from 8" to 24" gauge and designed at scales of 2" to the foot or greater - whether modeled for personal use, or purpose built for amusement park operation or private railroading.

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Topics may include: antique park gauge train restoration, preservation, and history; building new grand scale equipment from scratch; large scale miniature railway construction, maintenance, and safe operation; fallen flags; track, gauge, and equipment standards; grand scale vendor offerings; and, compiling an on-line motive power roster.
Glenn Brooks
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Re: Grand Scale Freight Yard Aspirations

Post by Glenn Brooks »

The small square end barges with the cupolas are likely self powered harbor or river craft. The square “cupolas”in the center look like wheel houses, set in a well amidships, but tall enuogh to afford good visibility for the helmsmen and crew. One or two look like they could potentially be landing craft with raised, reinforced bow. They might also be harbor tugs with blunt bows to push rail barges around the inner harbor. Or even something exotic as military harbor craft to tend submarine nets. The photo was taken in 1941. America was in the early stages of establishing war time footing then. Hard to tell with the reduced resolution of web imagery. But fascinating detail, whatever they are.
Moderator - Grand Scale Forum

Motive power : 1902 A.S.Campbell 4-4-0 American - 12 5/8" gauge, 1955 Ottaway 4-4-0 American 12" gauge

Ahaha, Retirement: the good life - drifting endlessly on a Sea of projects....
jcbrock
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Re: Grand Scale Freight Yard Aspirations

Post by jcbrock »

LV83.jpg
Pretty sure the original photo was the Lehigh Valley yard in Jersey City. Also pretty sure the barges were not self-powered. Maybe quarters for the bargemen though.
John Brock
Glenn Brooks
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Re: Grand Scale Freight Yard Aspirations

Post by Glenn Brooks »

John, fascinating! I clicked on the original photo I posted and it opened with a much more detailed image. The enlarged image is much clearer and more detailed.

They do indeed look like work barges of some sort, very similar to your photo. And they are huge compared to standard size freight cars. The ones all tied up in a slip, at the dock, seem to have some kind of boom and tackle on top of the small raised deck house. So your first comment was likely spot on- concerning some sort of local freight transfer. Apparently the Weehauken Terminal was the largest in the world at one time, and was served by something like 5 to 7 major east coast RAilroads.
Moderator - Grand Scale Forum

Motive power : 1902 A.S.Campbell 4-4-0 American - 12 5/8" gauge, 1955 Ottaway 4-4-0 American 12" gauge

Ahaha, Retirement: the good life - drifting endlessly on a Sea of projects....
jcbrock
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Joined: Tue May 22, 2012 7:50 pm
Location: Oregon

Re: Grand Scale Freight Yard Aspirations

Post by jcbrock »

The whole rail-water interface around NY is fascinating to me. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, it's here: http://www.trainweb.org/bedt/IndustrialLocos.html. I particularly liked Bush Terminal and Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal.
John Brock
Andrew Pugh
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Re: Grand Scale Freight Yard Aspirations

Post by Andrew Pugh »

jcbrock wrote: Sun Jul 17, 2022 7:35 pm <snip>
Those are lighters used to move freight around NY harbor. Areas without carfloat service had freight offloaded in NJ and delivered via these. I don't know why some had the funky cupolas, but they did. There were also carfloats that did not have the cars moved off via a floatbridge, but instead were delivered pier-side and the cars unloaded directly from carfloat to warehouse.
Thanks John! That makes a lot of sense.

Glenn, I too was thinking some sort of military landing craft given the apparent era of the photo.

-AP
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