I’ve explored a few different prototypes to model on this small layout, and eventually settled on a favorite environ of mine - the industrial conflagration of central New Jersey, along the Turnpike Corridor. This is at it’s most intense roughly between Newark and Perth Amboy. As a youngster, traveling between my home in the very bucolic Westchester County, NY and our beach home, in the equally bucolic Avalon, NJ, my favorite part of the four hour ride were the sights and smells along this portion of the New Jersey Turnpike. Activity was everywhere - planes, trains, automobiles, and ships. Smoke and haze all over. Refinery flare towers lighting up the night sky.
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| The inspiration - the southern end of the CNJ Sound Shore branch in the mid 70s. By the way, the plant in the foreground is a copper refinery/smelter and had an extensive 2’ narrow gauge plant railroad, with a dozen or so locomotives. |
At my O Scale club, I model the Penn Central, and initially my plan was to do the same at home, however, as I am now modeling in PROTO-48, and my home locomotives and rolling stock will not be useable on the club layout, I am no longer tethered to this specific railroad. This frees me up to model a portion, of one of my favorite sections of rail - the Central Railroad of New Jersey’s, Sound Shore Branch.
The Sound Shore Branch, is a small, five mile long branch line that diverges from CNJs Chemical Coast Line at Bayway (Linden); and then runs roughly parallel to it, but along the edge of the Arthur Kill. The Arthur Kill is a waterway between New Jersey and Staten Island, NY. Besides being used to access the industries along both of its shores, the Arthur Kill is a secondary way for vessels and barges to enter the NY/NJ seaport, from Raritan Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. For the first half of the branch, while there were passenger stations and trains, literally, no one lives there. The stations were for industrial complexes. The branch crosses the Rahway River, a tributary of the Arthur Kill, via a swing bridge, and enters the very industrial town of Carteret, NJ, it’s terminus. There are perpendicular connecting branches back to the Chemical Coast Line at Carteret and Tremley Point. Most of the land that the railroad traverses is tidal marsh. Factories were built on dredge fill, and the tracks were barely above the water line, and in some cases, partially submerged under a mix of water from the Kill, and “other” liquids. To give you some idea of the volume of traffic on this branch, in the early 1950s, this five miles of track had a half dozen or so daily passenger trains, and at least a dozen local freights. The entire branch was operated under Rule 93 - yard rules, ie. The entire branch was considered a yard, so just look out for the other guy and work it out.
An interesting feature of this branch is that the first industry at Bayway it served was a large Phelps Dodge electrolytic copper refinery, and the last industry in Carteret, was the even more massive, US Metals electrolytic copper refinery and smelter. The US Metals Plant had the largest smokestack east of the Mississippi until it was razed in the 1990s. New Jersey was the largest producer of refined (99.9% pure) copper for years, with four large plants within about a 10 mile line all on the Chemical Coast - the two I’ve mentioned on the CNJ Sound Shore Branch, and Anaconda in nearby Perth Amboy, and American Smelting and Refining in Woodbridge. Besides copper there were at least three large oil refineries, and the Dutch Boy White Lead works. Heavy heavy industry. All of the copper refineries had very large in-house narrow gauge railroad systems.
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Tremely Point - DuPont in foreground, GAF behind. If you look close you can see the volume of traffic, almost all tank cars, with some covered hoppers and boxcars. The DuPont plant alone has around 40-50 cars spotted or waiting spotting.
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The section of the railroad known as Tremely Point, is going to be my specific local. Tremley Point was the home of three large chemical plants, and several tank farms. GAF (General Analine and Film), DuPont, and American Cyanamid, all had large plants on Tremley Point. I will either model the twilight of the CNJ in the mid 70s, or early Conrail in the late 70s.
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We are roughly over the GAF and DuPont plants looking south. You can see the American Cyanamid Plant in the upper left corner. The Arthur Kill is at upper left and the Rahway River is in the center top. You can see the Sound Shore Branch Bridge crossing the Rahway River and entering Carteret. By the time this photo was taken, the bridge wasn’t being used anymore, and the Carteret portion of the Sound Shore was accessed by the perpendicular connecting branch from the Chemical Coast Line in Carteret. Also note the track curve of the Sound Shore and the partially submerged tracks.
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Twenty feet in O scale, equals about 1000 feet in real life, so there is going to obviously be extensive selective compression, and partial modeling. When I started steel mill modeling, I spent a lot of time researching and understanding how all the processes worked, what pipe carried what gas, etc. While I’ve tried, the chemical industry, and it’s infinite number of processes and configurations, has me completely stumped, so I don’t plan on going neurotic and trying to model every pipe and pump and tank correctly. (So don’t call me out on this) I am also not going to specifically model the GAF/DuPont/American Cyanamid plant structures exactly. Photographs of this area are not plentiful.
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| The Sound Shore Branch at upper left and the south end of the GAF plant. The dyestuffs and other chemicals produced at this plant, generated millions of gallons of industrial waste. Tremley Point was an ideal place for this, as no one lived there (the town of Tremley Point, where people do live is a mile or two away on the other side of the NJ Turnpike) , and you could just dig a ditch, like the milky grey one in the center of the photo and your problems would disappear in the tidal flow and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. While from our modern sensibilities this sounds, maybe horrible, it was quite common practice back then. Some of these plants had permits to haul acid waste out to sea in barges daily. Believe it or not, the above is vastly preferable to what many of the inland New Jersey chemical plants did - fill up unlined lagoons and retention ponds, that leached into the groundwater and did cause harm to many. There is some green, in this photo, but suffice to say I won’t be buying a whole lot of static grass. I am excited about the modeling challenges with these murky, muddy, polluted ditches and creeks. |
I’m going to stick with my hybrid freelance-prototype rule that I’ve used on my steel mill layout, to free myself up. This rule is that I don’t need to stick with a specific prototype, but whatever I model, has to have a prototype - hopefully that isn’t confusing. Basically it means I could build a model of a chemical plant using inspiration from many different prototypes, but that everything has to have existed. I’ve found this will produce an accurate looking model, but without some of the drudgery.
