It's not exactly easy tellling you what Northlandz, in Flemington, New Jersey actually is. It's a popular attraction, with lots of superlatives to pull you in: almost ten miles of track, thousands of buildings, hundreds of bridges, even a 94-room dollhouse and two spectacular organs. And yet...what?
'Model railroad' comes to mind, but it's nothing like the railfan dream of perfect authenticity you'd find at, say, the San Diego Model Railroad Museum. It has lots of small buildings, people and situations, but unlike Hamburg's Miniature Wonderland, its villlages and industries are not careful models; sometimes they are not even in proper scale.
So, what is it? The best I can say is that it is both an absorbing afternoon and the result of one man's obsession with modeling and building and adding more to what began as a basement amusement and grew and grew. Twenty-five years in, Bruce Willliams Zaccagnino ran out of space and built a 52,000 square foot public home for his trains, bridges, and more.
Landforms and the geologic strata lying beneath them at Northlandz are, shall we say, a bit unusual and dramatic?
That's Northlandz (and no, I have no idea why the name, and no one on site could tell me.) It's been operating by the side of the road between Philadelphia and New York since 1997, getting bigger and bigger year by year as Zaccagnino continued his obsession with modeling more. Click here for a video that will either charm you or perhaps leave you shaking your head a bit.
At Northlandz, accidents happen; fortunately, so do scrapheaps.
Eventually, as Zaccagnino got older and was widowed, and continued to do nearly all the maintenance himself while still adding on to it, the work got out of hand. Some parts fell into disrepair, things got dusty, funds ran short, and the master builder was ready to retire.
Some of Zaccagnino's architecture shows a distinct bent for the vertical and fanciful, and not just in urban settings.
In late 2019, Northlandz had a near-death experience. Zaccagnino had put the complex up for sale, and it was bought by Tariq Sohail, who planned to gut the building and use it as a warehouse. Until he visited the building and saw what was in it and changed his plans completely. A year and $300,000 worth of renovation, new lights and floors and a thorough cleaning, and it's back to "All Aboard!"
Even pleasant little villages and whistle-stops are usually surrounded by disrupted geology or the remains of aggressive mining.
I knew next to nothing of this when I stopped by near the end of a short road trip last fall. I had been there once, perhaps twenty years ago, and all I remembered was 'huge.'
It's still huge, but an afternoon there left me alternately charmed by small details, puzzled by what seemed like a few odd obsessions, of which more later, and certainly unsure that 'biggest' is 'best.' I think I'd recommend it as a place to go with kids, rather than as adult entertainment.
Zaccagnino seems to have had a taste for cliffhangers—literally, as these images attest. Note the red building at top right in the lower picture. The middle image comes with a sign explaining that the homeowner wouldn't sell her house to the mining company.
All those trains require a railyard and a roundhouse with turntable
If 'a bridge too far' is an expression, how about 'a bridge too many?' That would seem to fit here!
Some bridges are more spectacular than others. The one just below is said to have more than 6,000 pieces of wood in it. The others are just as special in their own way!
There may be cause for celebration down at the station, but elsewhere in Northlandz, under cover of night, sinister events may be unfolding...
And there's room for a bit of historical display as well. The Golden Spike ceremony completing the Transcontinental Railroad is a familiar scene, but I'm left a little puzzled what that sailing sloop is doing at the bottom of the abyss!
Northlandz is on U.S. 202 at Flemington, New Jersey; at present it's open weekends and Monday from 10 am to 6 pm, but will eventually return to a fuller schedule.
Exterior view: Jerrye&Roy Klotz/Wikimedia
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