Sunday - September 16, 2012
Local Color
We had HO gauge trains when I was a kid. No, not the standard loop around the Christmas tree, nor a Figure 8 set where you could run two trains into each other and smash them up Gomez Adams style, but a real model railroad that took up a whole corner of the basement. Remote control switches, all sorts of wiring, tracks going this way and that, lots of scale buildings and scenery. Come to think of it, it was more of my dad’s kit. It wasn’t the kind of model train set an 8 year old boy would want.
Anyway ... I remember all the train magazines, and all the articles on building this building, warehouse, roundhouse, paper-mache mountains, and so on ... and I recall that there often was some kind of wry underlying humor. Like you’d build this scale factory for your train layout, then call it the Miracle Chair Company, which then let you put up scale billboards or boxcar advertising that said “If it’s a good chair, it’s a Miracle!”. Hur hur. Funny names for your model towns, roads, businesses, and railways.
And I thought it was all just so cute and kitsch.
And then I moved down here, and found out it was for real. Here’s just one example ...
Nobody really knows why the road is called Federal Twist, but it’s been called that for a very very long time. Google it. The mill is theoretically still in business, though I think they only cut a log or two a year at this point. The building has been standing since the 1840s if not longer, and is absolutely chock full of the kind of humorous details model train people love. Yes, the sign is made from a real saw blade. The mill has an indoor overshot waterwheel. Hand-hewn of course. There is a sawdust pile 8 feet high under the building below the big saw. The place is in wretched condition, and a good part of the main floor is held up by a new timber baulk which in turn is held up with a bottle jack. I’m not sure where the mill race emptied out, but another stream comes sharply downhill across the very front of the building, and it looks like a secondary water wheel was once powered by it. The axle for that one is held up by a tree. Seriously, the tree grew right around it. Plus all the broken windows, saggy beams, and general beat to death “weathered” condition the small scale modelers love so much.
And it’s all for real, right here in Hunterdon County.
Posted by Drew458
on 09/16/2012 at 12:22 PM
Filed Under: • Daily Life •
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