The Garden State Centrai Model Railroad Club, Inc. (GSC)

Your hosts for the shows, Garden State Central Model Railroad Club inc., was formed in 1963 by a group of people who shared a deep interest in railroading. The club built its first layout in the Asbury Park Press office on Broadway in Long Branch, New Jersey, where it spent its first decade.

In 1973 the club moved a few miles down the shore to Asbury Park, beginning a thirty-six-year tenure that would define it as premier club with national presence. It was here that the Garden State Central matured from a group of hobbyists into an institution as a New Jersey non-profit corporation, a 100% NMRA club, and a fixture of the Shore’s fall and holiday calendar through its annual train shows.

It was also in Asbury Park that the club worked out the historical fiction at the heart of its modeling. The Garden State Central of the layout is imagined as a heavy-duty Class I railroad running from Jersey City west and north to Scranton, PA. The GSCRR is not a copy of any single prototype, but a composite of anthracite roads: primarily the Jersey Central, Lehigh Valley, with bits of the Reading, Delaware & Hudson, and Lackawanna. Members developed the railroad’s physical and operating character through field trips to the real lines, and the premise carried a quiet defiance: while in the real world Conrail absorbed nearly everything in the territory the club modeled, the GSCRR was presumed to have survived independent. 

The club left Asbury Park in 2009, and for four years the Garden State Central existed without a railroad. The next chapter had, in a sense, already been written. When preservationists fought to save Camp Evans, the former Marconi wireless station and Army radar laboratory in Wall Township,  and organizations began joining what became the InfoAge Science and History Museums, the Garden State Central was among first to sign on. When the club moved to Wall in 2013, it arrived not as a tenant but as a founding partner in a preservation project, taking its place on the Marconi Road campus alongside museums of radio technology, military electronics, military vehicles, fire trucks, vintage computing, and shipwrecks. 

The club refit its building and set to work on an entirely new HO layout, tightening the railroad’s scope to the Jersey City, NJ – Wilkes-Barre, PA mainline in 1954.

The route was worked out town by town: a Jersey City waterfront terminus with coal dumper, docks, passenger terminal,  and car float; Easton, PA featuring famous Lehigh Valley Station; a bustling South Bethlehem steel mill stretching over 40 feet; the famous town of Mauch Chunk (Jim Thorpe); the Blue Coal Huber Colliery at Ashley; and on into Wilkes-Barre passing Breaker #5, Vulcan Locomotive Works, Planter’s Peanuts, the Steamier Brewer, stations of the CNJ and LV, the Hollenbach breaker #2, and the Scott Street roundhouse of the Delaware & Hudson. 

The new railroad went up methodically and is still a work in progress. The club also built and adjacent museum room with displays about railroading, anthracite mining, and Bethlehem Steel surrounding push-button model train layouts gets can operate. 

More than sixty years after its founding, the club’s character is still what it was in 1963. Its members come from all walks of life, beginners, master craftsmen, train watchers, electronics tinkerers, scenery builders and operators. All are bound by the conviction that the hobby is best practiced together: learning, doing, and sharing.

The Garden State Central has now outlived two of its homes and all of the railroads it models. The GSC railroad in miniature, as it turns out, was the durable one.

The museum room is open during regular InfoAge hours. The HO scale railroad is open for special events, the Holiday Train Display & Christmas Spectacular, the All Scales Model Train Sale & Show, and on occasional museum days. It is always viewable through a large window.