When one is modeling various locales in Philadelphia, it's hard to ignore the Delaware River waterfront. Philadelphia is a large fresh water port lying about 80 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Philly is on the west bank of the river while Camden, NJ is along the east bank. Camden was home to RCA Victor and New York Shipbuilding Corp once upon a time and is also the home of Campbell Soup Co.
  
The entire scenario lends itself to some interesting modeling opportunities. I built the NJ section to occupy a wall and there's an aisle intervening. I considered installing a liftup track to connect the two, but decided instead to keep the 2' X 16' NJ section as a standalone switching layout. I use a small carfloat to logically connect the two ports for operating purposes. This approach works just fine. I'll cover NJ more in a future article.

An interesting factor in modeling a waterfront area is that the prototype often had to operate some fairly tight radius trackage at the dock areas. John Armstrong mentioned that in one of his books. Small switchers were used to handle just a few cars at a time. You can therefore pack a lot of operation in a small area and still be prototypical.

To do the river, I began by extending the layout with some scrap 2 X 4's connected to the main L-girders to form a base for the river. Then large slabs of foamcore were laid on top of the girders. Foamcore is lightweight, easy to cut and takes acrylic paint well. I then mixed gray, green, brown and black acrylic paint until I achieved the color that I wanted. I took the train to work over the Ben Franklin bridge so I got to see the river from above every day. When I was satisfied with the color, I applied it to the foamcore.

Now I was ready for the water. Since the river runs to the edge of the layout, I had to make a temporary dam out of masking tape. I spread newspaper below to catch the inevitable drippage. I used Enviro-tex for the water. As it cured and just before its final hardening, I used a screwdriver to work some ripples in the water.

The pilings were made of 1/4" dowels with rubber bands to wrap them into a bundle. When painted the rubber bands look like the real bindings for the pilings. They were glued to the base before the Enviro-tex was poured. The retaining walls are a combination of foamcore scored to simulate planks and Mr. Plaster castings.
 

 
The two primary carfloats used by the prototype railroads were two-track, 14 car floats and three-track 20 car floats. For now I just use a two-track 4 car "mini" float. The apron tower is scratchbuilt. The girders are from an old toy crane.
  
I have some cranes from various sources. One of them is an old AHM HO crane and one is an S scale Lehigh Valley Models crane. Both of them travel on N-scale flex track cut down the middle. I also use a crane from a old American Flyer crane car to unload cargo.

The tugboat is a shortened World War I minesweeper kit. The cargo ship is rather small for S, but a true 1/64 ship would take up the whole river. I recently added two S scale barges from Deerfield River Laser.

 

I hope you enjoy the articles as much as I enjoy writing them. As an amateur artist, I like to take the most realistic pictures as I can. The MRH website has quite a standard to "shoot" for. It's given us a new phrase: "Yes, it's a model..." quality. That's my goal and whether or not I achieve it, it's fun to try. Also, I like to face the challenge of taking unenhanced photos; no Photoshop, etc.