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 a 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 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 coal hauling roads: primarily the Jersey Central and 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. 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. When preservationists fought to save Camp Evans (the former Marconi wireless station and Army radar laboratory in Wall Township) and organizations began joining what would become 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 of national importance taking its place at 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 circa 1954.
The route was worked out town by town: a Jersey City waterfront terminus with a McMyler coal dumping machine, docks, passenger terminal, and car float; Easton, PA featuring the 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 Wilkes-Barre with the Breaker #5, Vulcan Locomotive Works, Planter’s Peanuts, the Stegmaier Brewery, CNJ station, LV station, the Hollenbach breaker #2, and the Scott Street roundhouse of the Delaware & Hudson.
The new railroad has been going up with methodical precision and is still a work in progress. The club also built an adjacent museum room with displays featuring railroading, anthracite mining, and Bethlehem Steel surrounded by push-button model train layouts guests 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 with beginners, master craftsmen, train watchers, electronics tinkerers, scenery builders and operators. All are bound by a 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, is the durable one.
The museum room is open during regular InfoAge hours. The HO scale railroad operates for special events, the Holiday Train Display & Christmas Spectacular and the All Scales Model Train Sale & Show.
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