The Brooklyn Terminal Railroad, Flushing Connecting Railroad, and other NYC-Era Miscelleny. (Screenshot warning!)

trainzlova8989

i like trains and bugs
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is a dimension where, despite all odds, the New York City Department of Docks and Ferries manages to push through an ambitious plan to connect the various, disparate offshore terminals of Brooklyn, providing a land connection directly from the New York Connecting Railroad's yard at 65th Street to New York Dock's Fulton Terminal near the Brooklyn Bridge. There is a dimension where, under 25 kilovolts of electric traction, steeplecabs whine over Second Avenue, with 30-car-trains of flour, manufactured goods, inbound subway cars, coal, fuel oil, scrap, and more. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Brooklyn Terminal Railway.

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The BTRR is my proto-lanced project to bring the ambitious Brooklyn Marginal Railway project to Trainz. In summary, this would have created a line - as earlier - from 65th Street to Fulton Terminal, covering roughly 6 miles. Fully electrified and operated jointly between all railroads which had an interest, this would have eliminated countless, time-and-labor intensive carfloat operations - specifically, those that didn't leave Long Island, solely between off-line terminals. The BTRR's core is this (and research is ongoing to attempt to find the original architectural maps and correspondence regarding this plan). However, the BTRR plays with the concept just a little bit - in this timeline, the railway never is subsumed by a class one, and extends to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with a branch going even further to connect to the BEDT at Kent Avenue. I'm not trying to capture specific track maps, but rather the feelings of the washed-out photographs of NYC in the 70s and 80s - Smokestacks past their glory days, overgrown and underused railway yards, mobbed-up transloading operations run out of sheetmetal stacks, impromptu ball games played on residential streets, miles of brownstones, trees-of-heaven, and generally the feeling of urban decay. On that note;

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Named to honor the commissioner of Docks that helped push the project through, Tomkins Terminal serves as the main eastern rail-marine transfer of the network. Here, barges from the Pennsylvania in Greenville, The Baltimore and Ohio and the (freelance!) New York and Dewey Beach in St. George arrive and depart. A complex of factories and warehouses adjoins the 5-track yard directly, and a track connection serves the former DL&W rail-marine yard nearby. Tomkins Terminal serves, in addition to the previous use, it is primary interchange between the former Bush Terminal operation, now (as of 197x) operated by New York Dock. On top of this, as some of the land accquired was from the Brooklyn Rapid Transit at the time, the South Brooklyn was able to negotiate operations out of TT, too. This means that, in addition to freight traffic, one may even see subway cars arriving.
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TT also features, arguably, one of the smallest "Union Engine Terminals." Following the increase in war traffic to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Brooklyn Navy Yard, and various facilities on Staten Island, an engine terminal was set up at a former LCL trolley transfer. In '46, the SBK moved into this, using it as a servicing point for their new, diesel 65 tonners. (Please accept the Golden Truth that this is a SBK 65 Tonner and not the dutch version being used because there's no american version.) You can see the diverse fleet well here - BTRR's small contingent of diesels often is spotted alognside their ubiquitous, former LIRR B-3 "rats", and their Baldwin and GE motors.
 
While the Brooklyn Terminal represents a surviving, high-quality electrified elevated freight railway that still has connections to Class 1s, the Flushing Connecting... doesn't. It's my first attempt using Basemapz, which is working well, considering the relative flatness of the area.

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Sickly from the outset, the FLCR was built originally by the NYC in order to try and outmaneuver the PRR and NH's project to build the New York Connecting Railroad - while both would then be on equal footing within Manhattan, the NYC wouldn't be able to tap into the freight market of Queens - and thus, they invested heavily in the construction of an offline terminal in the relatively far-flung region of College Point during the early 1910s. The FLCR, originally, did find a market - although it wasn't the veritable industrial titan as the other side of the city was becoming, it still served several significant online industries, primarily shipbuilding, in addition to the typical smattering of typical carload industries - such as coal, food, dairy products, furniture, heating oil, and lumber. The FLCR enjoyed considerable utility, given its status, during the world wars - College Point's shipbuilders did crank out patrol boats, minesweepers, and the like, while Edo produced aluminum floats.
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But as with many things, the 1950s was not particularly kind to it. Despite early success leading to the complete overhaul of the roads roster (Including an order to Lima for 4 LS-1200s that ended up being re-negotiated to 1 LS-1200 and 3 S12s) with a heavy bias to Baldwin power, and the road being spun off under independent management and NYC part-management the carload markets that had traditionally powered it had begun falling to trucks or closing entirely plus negotiating with the LIRR to purchase the Whitestone Branch and it's route over the Flushing Creek, therefore giving the FLCR a permanent interchange, the Flushing Connecting would not recoup it's success, shifting mostly to deliveries of consumer goods. The worst blow yet would come with the Penn Central merger; It effectively wiped out any need the NYC had.
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Anyway, our year is 197x-199x. This is Ulmer Street Yard, plus 31st Avenue Team Yard. The former is the closest thing the railroad has to a central yard; the main locomotive shop is that 2-stall brick building, and most trains are made up here - usually, 2 jobs run a day, with one taking the switching from Corona Yard to Ulmer St. and one working from Ulmer Street to Tallman Yard, and usually moving a couple cars on and off the barges. Most interchange is with the LIRR via Corona, but occasional freight either for the line's terminal in the Bronx or which is avoiding the Hell Gate route for whichever reason (more often than not, shipments for the west end branch lines bypassing Fresh Pond) arrives by barge. 31st Ave. Team Yard was opened in the 1920s, following the line's eviction from their previous terminals closer to College Point, and is the closest we have to an Anchor industry, serving many customers both directly and as a team yard.
 
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