My last section of the left leg of my Westside Railroad includes a reverse loop for the high line. Close to the reverse loop is the ramp connecting the high line with the street level tracks. Those tracks are 270 and 180 degrees circular tracks with a radius of 13″ or larger. They take a lot of real estate away that I could use for structures. When I came across a few pictures of the former Hoboken Ferry terminal at Barclay Street, I was immediately convinced to have a great candidate for the reverse loop. The location in downtown Manhattan is clearly out of scope for my West Chelsea themed railroad. However, the building was so much different from anything else I had so far. It will add color and interest to the layout, and it’ll also help me to cloak a good part of these circular tracks.
Background and History
The Hoboken Ferry Terminal at Barclay Street played a crucial role for the ferry service between New Jersey and Manhattan. The first steam ferries over the Hudson River started in 1821 and services would continue until 1967. Ferries carried passengers and cars across the river. Moreover, they allowed commuters from New Jersey working in Manhattan before tunnels and bridges connected the two sides. The Barclay Street ferry house was the one serving lower Manhattan. Other terminals were further north on Christopher Street, 14th and 23rd Street along the Westside Highway.
The building I’m modeling was constructed at the place of a previous ferry house in 1910 by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (DL&W) Railroad Company. The DL&W had acquired the ferry boat service between Hoboken and Barclay Street in 1903. The building lasted until 1969 (by then owned by Erie & Lackawanna), when it was torn down to make space for the World Trade Center. Nothing remains as of today from the ferry house and respective pier 15. Unfortunately, publicly available historical sources on the railroad’s Manhattan ferry terminals are scarce.
List of sources used:
- Romance of the Hoboken Ferry by Harry J Smith, Jr (1931); text extract here
- Hoboken, Ferry and Train Station by Maggie Blanck (website)
- Trackside in the Erie Lackawanna New Jersey Commuter Zone by William J. Brennan (2005)
Overall Size, Sections and Compression of the Model
I’m not aware of any detailed plans of the Barclay Street ferry house. Available maps from the early twentieth century show an outline of the entire structure with an approximate size of 153 ft by 240 ft (see for instance survey map for Pier 57 & surrounding ferry piers from the NYC Department of Records). It’s unclear, however, what this outline includes. Elevations and absolute measurements for the buildings are completely absent, leaving me only with relative proportions inferred from archive photos.
The main sections of the buildings are
- the three stories high main building body with the typical clerestory roof. It has an estimated height of 63 ft and width of 100 ft.
- Two wings on the southern and northern side of the main building, each one about 30 ft wide.
- A T-shaped two stories high entrance section integrated into the main building front that is about 68 ft wide and about 55 ft deep.
- A roof that covers the ground floor of the entrance section and is as wide as the main building.
The multiple sections of the building, each one with different extension and elevation, create a quite complex overall geometry. Roof gables with various orientations create a confusing pattern on aerial photos. From a few available color photos we know that the building had a steel skeleton. Corrugated metal sheets painted blue covered the steel frame. Corner posts by contrast were white while new. Dark grey tar paper of constant width with a rusty tint covered the roofs. The building’s orientation along a longitudinal axis with one main hall and two side wings are reminiscent of a church with nave-aisles. Together with the six arched windows of the front facade they give the building a cathedral-like appearance.
My slightly compressed model is 11.8″ wide and between 6 and 12.5″ deep. It includes the main building section but only part of the side wings. With my available limited layout space, I had to highly compress the depth of the entrance section. On my layout, the building sits in the southwestern layout corner and faces the main layout axis diagonally. With this, the building’s southern side is longer than the northern side.
The covered ground floor of the entrance shows a staircase leading up to the main ticketing and waiting hall on the second floor. To follow the prototype, I will include those stairs. Due to the lack of more detailed photos, I will have to compromise on details for the model. For instance, I’ll omit details on a ramp for cars leading up to the ferry on the northern side. My own additions to the model are the circular tracks through the building. The reverse loop transits through the second floor on an elevation of about 1.8″. That is high enough to require separate roofs on both sides of the main building where the tracks enter and exit. Details further below.
Front Design and Construction
Once I had figured out the overall size and the size of the various sections of the building, I began drawing the front. The archive photos helped with the proportions. As a proof of concept, I cut the front wall of the main body with the windows. I also built a sample of the corrugated sheet and painted it in a blue. I also gave the blue slight turquoise tint to match the weathering as seen in the color photos. When I added the white corner posts, I felt that the construction looked good and very prototypical. Except, it was way too large. I had to go over the estimated width and elevations again and redrew a second, much smaller version. This time it looked more to scale when I placed N scale vehicles in front of the main facade.
The first attempt to build the front facade also provided me a testbed for the stained windows. According to Cash-Iron Architecture in New York by Margot Guile and Edmund Dillon, Jr. (1974), the front has “round-headed windows bordered by squares of color glass” (p. 10). Not having more details than this, I did my best at cutting the windows from .015″ laser board as per photos. I then used thinned Micro Kristal Clear (a glue) from MicroScale to which I added blue and red acrylic paint to wet the square panes around the clear window panes in the center. This worked well as the border panes are less than 1.5 mm wide. Capillary action is strong enough to create a thin film of glue which then cures within a few minutes. When dry, the acrylic paint gives the windows a slight red or blue tint. This method yielded to some nice results, as can be seen in the night photo further below.
At the same time as I was designing the front facade, I began work on the entrance section. The entrance is a T-shaped structure on stilts that covers the staircase leading from the ground to the second floor. Through the stairs, the ferry passengers can reach the spacious waiting room with the ticket windows without being exposed to bad weather. The entrance section also connects to the passenger bridge that runs across West Street to the north-east corner of Barclay Street. It was added in 1925 and removed again in 1940 to make space for the elevated highway. I will not include this extension for now but might add it later depending on available space.
As material for the walls of the the main building and the entrance I used 1/16″ MDF. Windows are cut from .015″ laser board. I used the same material for the corrugated sheeting. That sheeting was easily made by engraving square wave pattern of 1.2 mm length. I added protruding corner posts using .0416 x.0625 scale lumber from Midwest Products (#8017).
Side Walls With Through Tracks
As mentioned earlier, my intention was to use the ferry house as a way to hide the reverse loop and the ramp from the high line to the street level. Both tracks are curved. By placing the building diagonally at 60 degrees against the main centerline of the layout I’d be able to cover a good portion of the two tracks. For the ramp I had to calculate the exact elevations at the points where tracks and walls intersect. The elevated high line was a bit more complicated, as the required clearance for the curved track would exceed the elevation of the roof edge. I had to cut openings in the side walls similar to tunnel portals. The roof would be another challenge, but more on this further below.
To provide enough stability and robustness to the building, I designed the clerestory walls as complete walls with windows and openings as required. With the same goal in mind, I also added beams or rafters across the main hall as well as over the aisles. I cut them from 1/8″ thick basswood. Considering the wood grain, I was able to make mine strong enough to support the roof. The real ones are much leaner as they are designed as trusses instead of just beams.
Detailed Design of Entrance Section
While one of my sources used shows photos from the building’s interior, I could not find any material on the staircase leading up to the second floor of the entrance. The visible part of the stairs are two symmetrical flights leading up to a landing in the center. Considering the height of the ground floor, I’m assuming that one wider flight of stairs leads to the second floor. The rightmost photo below shows the result of my design. Using 1 mm (1/32″) basswood gave me a rise height of a bit more than 6 scale inches, which is still within the architectural norm. The railing I cut from .015″ laser board. Priming them with Tamyia spray makes them strong enough when even with the handrails only between .015 and .020″ thick. I sprayed a metallic finish dimmed with light gray over steps and handrails to give them the heavyweight appearance that we still see in subway stations today.
All of the entrance structure was cut with 1/16″ MDF, including posts. To strengthen the outside posts, I interlocked posts cut with the front walls with posts from the lateral walls. I also added 1/8″ styrene channels as center posts in front of the stairs, simulating the steel columns visible on photos. The outside of the entrance section got the same treatment as the main facade. Corrugated sheeting as per photos, white window sills and corner posts and stained glass windows. For the windows I applied the same technique as for the large arched windows, except that I also stained their center panes.
Integrating Lighting
At this point, building frame and walls were complete and I could proceed to adding internal lighting and the roofs. I figured out that the structure with large and low roofs and with relatively small, windowed surface would look better permanent lighting on my layout. To begin with, I added a row of three LEDs under the roof ridge plus an additional light on each side of the main hall. To illuminate the entrance, I added two LEDs on the second floor and one in the center of the ground floor.
For the lights I used 0805 warm white SMD LEDs. I enclosed them in a short piece of 5 mm styrene tubing and used hot glue to secure them. A blob of hot glue also provides a lens to diffuse the light. All LEDs are soldered to strips of self-adhesive copper band. A step-down converter ensures a constant voltage of 3.3V from the 12V DC bus without the use of resistors.
Roofing
The Hoboken Ferry House of the Lackawanna Railroad spared me the most fun part of designing and building it in a model to the very end. Its rood is not overly complicated, but with the different sections, angles, and orientations it definitely posed some challenges. Worth mentioning are the gable roofs of the entrance section which intersect and result in a valley on both sides. Furthermore, the covered ground floor with the hipped roof that also has a small flat section with three skylights on one side according to the prototype.
The basic roof construction was easy. I’d use .035″ thick laser board for the tar paper covered roof decking. The visible and very regular seams initially let me assume that the roof material would be metal sheets. Consequently, I engraved the seams with the laser cutter and lined it with 0.4 mm styrene round rods to give them some depth. Until I read in one of the sources used that the roof was covered with tarpaper. This did not fundamentally change the construction, but I had to make adjustments to painting and weathering. Specifically, I had to tone down the metallic coating by misting it with gray primer spray. I’d also weather it with an acrylic rust wash from Vallejo.
Covering the tunnel-like openings that projected over the roof gutter on the side was more difficult. The first step was to understand how the elliptical tunnel roof intersects with the gentle slope of the gable roof. Drawing projections between x, y, and z-axis in Inkscape provided me with the correct geometry for both the resulting curve (again an ellipsoid). Next, I had to figure out how to build a tunnel roof that would not reduce track clearance but would be both strong and flexible enough for a curved bend. The opening on the northern side of the house had one additional challenge. To keep enough clearance, the elliptical cylinder of the tunnel crown had to intersect with the gable in an acute rather than rectangular angle.
The solution was a three-layer construction. To create a tunnel crown, I used 2 to 3 mm wide lumber or MDF strips glued over three arched segments. A first layer of .015″ laser board with linear groves glued over the strips with two component epoxy resin created a stable and strong base for the roof. After I had verified that the curvature of the opening in the gable roof was correct, I glued that roof section in place also with epoxy resin. Finally, after a one hour wait until the resin is cured enough, the third and last step. A final layer with the exact elliptical shape over the tunnel crown completes the roof section. For this I used .017″ thick laser board. Using the epoxy resin proved to be the best and probably only way to get a robust, elegant, and permanent construction for a totally un-prototypical feature of the model.
The remaining sections of the roof were added quickly and without any issues. While the roofs over the elevated track were glued down, I made the remaining parts of the main roof removable. For the clerestory roof I used small magnets to hold it down and to preserve its pitch. Similarly, I added a pair of magnets to one of the corners of the two remaining roof segments behind the tunneled roof sections. I also made the gable roof of the entrance removable but secured it with multiple magnets.