The Background On The Atlantic Pacific Railroad

The Atlantic Pacific Railroad (APRR) is a freelance fictional railroad which came about in the early 80’s. While many people think it came from the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), this is not the case. The name APRR is derived from some of my favorite railroads over the years. It started with Long Island Railroad, as I grew up on Long Island. Along came Santa Fe, then Burlington Northern and Penn Central. Add to the mix New Haven, New York Central, Pennsylvania, Southern Pacific, Conrail, and Amtrak. As I rolled into the 90’s, CSX became an exciting railroad to watch and model. I do have some Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific models here and there. All of this in HO scale.

A layout was never really built until my move to New Jersey in 1995. I had a small layout in the basement of a condominium. It was nice, but mostly just for running trains, especially when friends and family came over. Everyone loves to see trains run, who doesn’t?

Fast forward to 2001 when a house came into the mix. This was a priority for the future, but the space was cut back severely. A much smaller layout, but none the less trains were to be run again. The layout had 3 mainline track loops, a more rectangular look, a staging yard in the adjacent room (A/C heating system area), and peninsula on the other end near a wall. A different look to running trains and storing freight cars.

In 2005 the opportunity came about to add a room on to the back of the house for my train room. It had to be nice looking from the outside, yet be able to be turned into a usable room when the time would come to leave this house. A 20’ x 20’ room was created with a trey ceiling, high hat lights, and French doors which hid what was behind it when looking in from the living room. A perfect front!

As I drew up my plans for the ultimate railroad, things started to take shape. A two track mainline, a large passenger terminal, freight yards, industries, and more. Everything you wanted to see on a train layout. Up and running by late 2007, the layout was powered with 4 DC power packs. It was a single level layout, and it was huge! Passenger trains as long as 12 feet ran the layout, 2 at a time! The passenger terminal had 8 main tracks with 12 supporting tracks and engine facility. Freight trains were abundant. The 2 large industries that stood out was the Cargill Grain Facility, and Tropicana Juice Factory. I was happy, trains were running and I was having fun. 

During this time, my hangout on Thursdays (and to this day) is the local hobby shop. Comradre, friends, things to look at and buy. Over the years you develop some friends that stand out. I am fortunate to have two at that time. One was the owner of the shop at the time (he sold it) and my other friend and I moved to another ‘train friendly’ hobby shop. This other gent, who has been not only a great friend but has been more of a mentor to me, and I greatly appreciate his help and support to this day. He’s told me many things, one of them was the world of DCC and how you can many trains on the same track. Wow! How cool is that! I read so much about it, I figured down the road I would convert the layout from DC to DCC. The owner gave me a great deal on an NCE DCC Power Cab system, which is a great start. It sat in the box for many years. In the meantime, my friend asked me if I wanted to see his friend’s layout. This was more of an inspirational tour. During this time, I was changing the layout from DC to DCC and adding a second level. The lower level was to be used to store trains in full sets, meaning an engine and cars.

The lower level was going to be built right down the middle of the layout, similar to the way the LIRR runs trains into NY Penn station. Tracks on each side by Sunnyside Yard in queens, NY. This became very tedious, and despite having the correct tools to get the grade right, it wasn’t coming out like I had planned. Meanwhile, my friend tells me to come with him again to this ‘gathering’ as it’s named, and see the layout in action and get a private tour, along with running trains. The owner of the layout is quite the master, not only in designing his layout, but in making you feel part of the group.

While running his railroad after a couple of times, I knew that my railroad needed something to make it run right. It needed a helix! Since I’m pretty handy with wood, but still lacking a couple of needed skills to make this happen, I found a guy in CA who would build me the helix that I needed. Double track helix, two tracks around the top. This would eliminate my attempt to make the grade to the lower level, and still give me what I wanted. This was ordered in 2012 and took about 9 months to get. It was custom, built to spec, and made into kit form. Shipped to me with an instructional video, it took me 5 months of nights and weekends. Meanwhile, the more and more I spent with these guys in the group, I learned that I didn’t want to see trains run, I wanted to operate trains, just like the real railroads do, just without one detail, paperwork! This came from running on the layout of the leader of our group. His layout has many jobs to do on his railroad, all without paperwork. I like to call it ‘freestyle operation’. Another guy in the group who hosts sessions uses paperwork with trains staged with cars that need to be switched off the list. Still a fun session.

As the railroad was being built, I needed to have someone give me his opinion to see how the track work is coming along. Not so much as to how it looks, but as to how it would function running trains. I had cork roadbed down, track, switches, all in place. My friend and mentor comes over, looks at the progress, and challenges me to ‘follow an imaginary train’ on the tracks. He asked me to show him how the train would run in once direction. That was fine. Then he asked me to show him how it would run on the same tracks to make the same moves as before. I couldn’t do that. Why is that? The way I set up the switches, it was laid out to only run in one direction. He asked me for extra switches laying around, and within an hour or so, we had reworked to areas into ‘interlocking’ sections on the layout. I’m a firm believer that if you’re shown something that is functional and makes sense, it’s worth changing. So I ripped up a good months of track work (plus cork), and proceeded to make the changes. With his help and mentoring, the Atlantic Pacific Railroad was coming to fruition.  He quickly named these two interlocking as ‘West Harold’ and ‘Little Jamaica’. The latter due to the amount of switches in this interlocking area. Some additional suggestions along the way came from two other guys of the gathering. One of them laid out the tracks for the peninsula that would hold a large warehouse and tank car facility. The other suggested to add another loop track around the bottom of the helix, for storage of another train, or if I wanted, constant running around the lower level thru staging. These were both added during the construction process. The last part of the layout was to add the DCC system. During the time of construction, I was able to get my hand on a DCC system that was not only larger, but wireless as well. This way, guys running trains could move freely around the layout without plugging in to the system. Perfect! This part of the layout I will go into more detail in another post.

On October 24, 2014, I hosted my first session. Not so much to run trains (which we did run a few), more to show off the layout as I was not only part of this great group, but to be able to host operating sessions down the road. This is the start of the operation of the Atlantic Pacific Railroad.