By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea

   We have been staying at Sue's family shore house in Stone Harbor, New Jersey for the past week. Over the years we have ridden most of the roads and trails in and around Cape May County, but we are constantly trying to find something new to throw into our regular routes down here.
   I have ridden along Ocean Drive north through Avalon, Sea Isle City and Ocean City countless times, and frankly, the road conditions have badly deteriorated. The pavement is a very porous asphalt, and it has become very rough, not only due to the traffic levels but also because of the scouring from wind-driven sand and rain during winter storms.
   New home construction and the relocation of sewer and gas lines have also taken a toll on the pavement, as bulging or sunken patched sections, especially on this stretch of 7-mile Beach, have contributed to an intolerably bumpy ride. The the volume of distracted drivers, as well as clueless people riding bicycles (not to be confused with actual cyclists), often against the flow of traffic, add to our quest to find new pedaling territory.
   Probably because my few experiences with Wildwood have always involved the boardwalk and the busy roads nearby, I have avoided riding my bicycle anywhere near the barrier islands that extend toward Cape May. During a recent stay in Stone Harbor by herself, right after school ended, Sue decided to take a chance and head south through Anglesea and "The Wildwoods".
   She was pleasantly surprised, especially by the smooth pavement and the frequent presence of a marked bike lane. I knew there were a good number of traffic lights through the center of the island, where the bulk of the boardwalk traffic filters in, but she recommended a parallel street that wasn't too bad and explained that there were miles of fairly uninterrupted cycling as you head out south through Wildwood Crest.
   I took her suggestion to check out that route and enjoyed it immensely. I was glad to find the route didn't cross into Cape May proper, and I could avoid the bridge that sits right at the end of the Garden State Parkway, making it very difficult for cyclists to navigate that high-traffic area.
   Though I did have to wait for the LONG traffic light to change at the Parkway, after that intersection, it was a fairly easy route back across the peninsula to one of my favorite stretches of cycling down here, up Shore Drive along Delaware Bay. I eventually ended up on Bayshore Road, then weaved through some small roads in the community of Burleigh to connect with the Middle Township Bike Path. Once I was back into Cape May Courthouse, it was the all-too-familiar drag back the causeway into Stone Harbor. Luckily I was "treated" to just a crosswind that day.
   I actually enjoyed that Wildwood section of the ride so much that I repeated it a couple days later at the end of a longer, counter-clockwise route I pieced together. I received a gift of a tailwind and was flying through Wildwood Crest and Anglesea, across the bridges near Hereford Inlet back to Stone Harbor.

   Perhaps she was inspired by a series of videos on the history of the Jersey shore which we were watching on YouTube, but Sue suggested a ride from Ocean City, through Atlantic City to the tip of Brigatine Beach. A little over a week ago, she had ridden up that way to catch the NJ Transit train from A.C. into Philadelphia. She had done this mainly to avoid having to drive another car back and forth from home to the shore, so she had most of the route mapped out already!

   I found it a bit funny that we were starting at my regular turnaround spot at 34th Street in Ocean City. I would usually be heading out over the Upland Thoroughfare Bridge and taking an inland track through Petersburg, Dennisville and Middle Township, back to Cape May Courthouse.

   This time we pedalled north on some roads which had light car and foot traffic, as well as smoothly-paved (at least compared to 7-mile Island) bike lanes. Note that our first crossing of the steep Ocean City-Longport Bridge over Great Egg Harbor was aided by a tailwind and fresh legs, but I went at it pretty hard, since all this flatland riding was not going to help me when I would return to the hilly Schuylkill Valley!

   With wind still at our backs, we sailed into Longport, and took a sweeping turn onto Ventnor Avenue. A few blocks later we turned right and pedaled over to Atlantic Avenue so that we could view Lucy the Elephant in Margate City. Lucy had recently undergone a $2.4 million restoration to her wooden and metal-plated "skin" and had been unveiled with fresh paint just after Christmas 2022.

   Cycling through Margate was a treat, with a super-wide bike lane that was extra-smooth! The lane tapered a bit, but was still of high-quality paving when we reached Ventnor, where the avenue also became four lanes of traffic.

   Majorly disappointed but certainly not surprised, we completely lost bike lanes when we reached O'Donnell Park, which sits on a wedge-shaped plot bordering Black Horse Pike (U.S. Route 40), and entered downtown Atlantic City. We benefitted from being there off-peak on a Thursday afternoon, but we still had to be more careful with the car traffic, and the road surface was noticeably poor around the casinos.

   We decided to duck over to Arctic Avenue, which ran parallel to the west, and found it to be in a bit better condition, then we turned left on North Carolina Avenue. We had a conversation about which streets were which property colors in Monopoly while we headed toward the cluster of high-rise hotel/casinos like the Borgata, Harrah's and the Golden Nugget.

   We were grateful that traffic was light while riding down what would have otherwise been a VERY bicycle-unfriendly Brigantine Boulevard and bridge over Absecon Inlet. Wide storm grates with large slots running the direction of our thin bicycle wheels (of course) forced us to take over the complete outside lane for safety. There was a sidewalk of sorts in the northerly direction, but no real way to get on or off of it safely - we certainly weren't looking forward to the return trip on this road!

   Once over the bridge, the four-lane, divided highway into Brigantine had a wide shoulder which provided some security, and again, it was a Thursday afternoon, so we returned to more relaxed riding conditions. The city seemed very laid-back, probably because it is isolated by the single bridge, out on this spit of land away from A.C.

   Before turning around, we quickly checked out the beach access point for vehicles. The North Brigantine Natural Area has a nearly three mile stretch of salt marsh, coastal dune and rare species habitat.

   The return trip pretty much traversed the same territory, though we did ocassionally use other streets, particularly when the northbound leg had included the one-way variety. We did encounter a couple of dangerous cyclists pedaling against traffic, incredibly, one of which was going across that hair-raising Absecon span! The other was riding straight at us on an e-bike, and when I told him he was putting us all in danger, he replied, "Shut up," and proceded to curse at me over his shoulder, as he nearly veered into a head-on collision with the oncoming traffic. That would have surely taught him a lesson!

   It didn't seem too long before we were back in Longport, and Sue mentioned that it had a reputation as a rather high-class community. I commented that wasn't too impressed during our initial pass through. but then I started seeing all these beautiful homes and wondered why I hadn't noticed them on our first shot through the borough. It wasn't until later that I realized, when we had made the sweeping turn onto Ventnor Avenue, we were actually only in Longport for a few blocks. Now, in the more affluent heart of Longport, we had missed the turn over to the boulevard that reached the bridge. We were headed toward "The Point", which dead-ended at Great Egg Harbor.

   The detour of an extra half mile or so definitely wasn't needed before the climb back over the Ocean City-Longport Bridge! I started it with enthusiam but was fairly gassed when I rolled over the top.

   There was a bit of a headwind through Ocean City, so I took the responsibility to pull our mini-peleton through the homestretch back to our car. A stop at the local ice cream shop was a proper reward for the 42-mile roundtrip.

   Later on that evening, I considered that within the couple months I had already pedaled nearly half of a potential course along the entire Atlantic coast of New Jersey from Cape May to Perth Amboy. With the intent of completing this 150-mile route by the end of the year, I have already covered 57 of the miles from Cape May Point to Brigantine, plus the 7 miles from Sea Bright to Sandy Hook and 12 more on the Henry Hudson Trail.

   There is an 18-mile segment on Long Beach Island that is completely isolated by Little Egg Inlet to the south and Barnegat Inlet to the north. The most logistically challenging section would be the 43 miles between Island Beach State Park and Sea Bright, which I visited during my Sandy Hook ride about a month ago. The park requires a 20-mile round trip to reach the turnaround, and there would also be a 10-miler on the Sea Bright end, so I'm considering the use of NJ Transit's North Jersey Coast Line train to keep the necessary riding total under 70 miles to cover that segment!

   Finally, there would be a fairly simple 12-mile route from Perth Amboy to reach the Henry Hudson Trail. I would then ride out to complete the only 2-mile segment of that path I hadn't ridden, between Belford and Atlantic Highlands.

   

   

They Don't Go "Choo-choo" Anymore!

   Most parents today have never even seen a steam locomotive during their lifetime, so I'm not sure why, when they are speaking to their young children, they insist on refering to trains as "Choo-choos", since they are being pulled by diesel-electric locomotives, which hum and rumble!

   Anyhow, just to alert regular readers, this blog entry is not going to have much to do with bicycles. You should keep in mind that, when I dismantled my large third-floor model railroad back in 2010, I made a nice sum of money selling off locomotives, railcars and structures, which allowed me to upgrade my bicycle collection and set some funds aside for buying parts for future bicycle projects.

   A secondary inspiration for this blog entry was a recent conversation among some friends, when I was introduced to someone as "Glen, the bike guy". My buddy Matt immediately piped in, "...but he has plenty of other interests!", which is something I always emphasize when around our crowd of predominantly teachers and/or cyclists.
   You can see photos and info on my old layout HERE, but it has been ten years since I started to build my new Lehigh-Lackawanna layout, which was planned to be more manageable in size and more focused in its geography and detail. I wrote previously about the basic design of the new layout and its early construction, but I eventually found the simple oval was a bit boring to operate, and because my shop space is now a much more inviting space to set up the indoor trainers, I was able to reclaim the wall space around the room to expand the layout.

   I learned a couple of simple lessons from my previous model railroad construction experience, most importantly to avoid any duck-unders, build everything at a comfortable height (for working on the layout and for viewing) and avoid including a confusing spaghetti of track. However, an interesting twist came early on in the process, when a friend was moving and needed a new home for a large piece of furniture, which happened to be the dispatcher's desk from the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western  (later merged into the Erie Lackawanna, one of the railroads I model) station in East Stroudsburg, PA!

   The desk accommodated a seated person and drawers on each side, so the tabletop was a rather spacious 4 x 5 feet. The idea of including it in the layout room came to me very quickly. I had to go through an interesting process of building temporary legs wide enough for me to be able to slide the desk underneath one end of the layout oval. After very careful measurements, I then cut down the existing legs to a proper height on which to rest the oval layout on the tabletop.

   I added facia boards to the sides of the oval section and a dark blue drape to hide the support legs:

  

   As you can see, this photo was taken before the center viewblock/divider was installed between the Bethlehem and P&L Junction sides of the oval. I mention this to not only give context to the construction process, but to also help explain why this article is being written ten years after I started. Finding a usable background image, one with decent resolution that I could fairly easily edit to represent mid-1970s Bethlehem took over a year alone!

   I certainly didn't work on the layout every day, and there were some extended dormant periods - my wife and I having three of our four parents pass in the span of 2½ years made it hard for a while to scrape up enthusiam - but there is a LOT of work involved, particularly when you have a side gig of building/repairing bicycles. I was also still homeschooling both of my boys back when I first started construction of the model railroad!

   I strangely enjoy carpentry and assembling the benchwork for a layout, even with fairly simple tools (I don't have a table saw or band saw). I am definitely not an electrician and had to learn a lot, particularly when it came to the modern world of DCC installation inside model locomotives (look it up, as it's too complicated to explain here). I enjoyed building many structures on the railroad, but the bridges are a bit of a headache, particularly the Hill To Hill span in Bethlehem, which, because there are no existing models that replicate its design, has to be "scratch-built" or "kitbashed".

   Because I was using photo backdrops, instead of painting my own background landscapes, the painting with this layout involved a lot less of the artistic-type brushstrokes, and sometimes even a spray can was the way to go. I also summoned up a bit of tailoring skills to put together the drapery that neatly hides the supporting legs and materials I store beneath the benchwork.

   The planning of the layout with railroad design software and the arrangement and editing of images for the background panels took countless hours at the computer. After all of this, the actual laying of track and connecting the feeder wires to a power source seems rather simple.

   As the oval section of the layout now stands, the P&L Junction side just needs more grass and trees installed where I have the landscaping supplies temporarily stored in the first photo, taken from the room's entryway. Bethlehem is about 80% complete - that darn Hill To Hill Bridge is holding me back! 

   The original idea was to have some sort of fold-up railroad yard coming off from Bethlehem, but the plan evolved to leave the yard in place as an area in which to assemble trains and send them into the scenes on the oval. I then decided it would be fun to add some scenery to the yard area to represent Sayre, PA, which was the operational center of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. I included the passenger station on the backdrop, and I am assembling a model of the employee walkbridge that once spanned the engine terminal and yard tracks.

   No, that building isn't floating in the background - if you look closely, there is a warehouse in front of it, which is unfortunately a greyish blue, not too far off of the same shade of sky I've used to paint the backdrop panel. I'm thinking of tucking some bits of trees around the warehouse roof to better visually separate it from the sky.

   Behind the Sayre backdrop there is a single hidden track which decends a few inches, runs below Sayre Yard and emerges at an interlocking tower leading to the West Side of Binghamton, NY.

   This area, serviced by the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, is "proto-freelanced", meaning it is based on the real-life location, but I've made up the track arrangement and some of the industries. On his New York, Susquehanna and Western layout, my friend Steve had included a spur that is on a slight rise with a switchback to serve some factories. I really liked this feature, so I've replicated his design here.

   Tioga Mills actually sat on the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Waverly, NY, just across the state line from Sayre, and it didn't look a whole lot like my structure. There is an enclosed area for unloading grain at the silos, as well as a covered plaform for loading finished flour.

   Parlor City Paper Box Company does exist in real life, but it is located in downtown Binghamton, and it is only served by trucks. Binghamton was nicknamed "The Parlor City" because of the abundance of stately Victorian homes built here during the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

   Wainwright Plastics is an homage to an all-time favorite movie, "It's a Wonderful Life". In a memorable scene George Bailey is sharing a telephone with his future wife, Mary, when his friend (and her current boyfriend) Sam calls her. George suggests that Sam's father should move the new Wainwright factory into the old tool and machinery works building in Bedford Falls. References were made that the fictional town was located in upstate New York.

   The West Side also contains a small interchange yard and connecting track with the Delaware and Hudson Railway.

   I have visited Binghamton a couple of times in the recent past, and there are a few distinctive features within the city's railroad corridor that I wanted to include. Rounding the corner, there is a girder bridge carrying the railroad over Route 11, then the main reason I wanted to add this branch of the layout, the dramatic twin railroad bridges over the Chanango River. The Erie bridge will be on the photo backdrop, but I will model the double-track Lackawanna girder bridge.

   Finally, trains will enter downtown Binghamton and pass the iconic North Depot Street warehouses,  pass under the Chanango Street Viaduct (yet to be built) and reach the DL&W Passenger Station. There had been a three-dimensional model of the station produced years ago, but I haven't found anything available, and it is way too complex to scratchbuild. As a result, I had to flip the track arrangement, so that the rails run on the south side of the station, instead of the north.

   If you are interested, when I have the layout more complete, I will take more detailed photos of layout and post them on the Lehigh Valley Railroad Modelers website, which I help maintain for the Anthracite Railroads Historical Society. I'll let you know when that time comes.

Back to more cycling-related topics next time!