The Brooklawn Circles

New Jersey once had a love affair with highway traffic circles - a devilish device designed to keep traffic moving quickly in multiple directions. Quickly, that is until you got a lot of traffic. At one time NJ had 101 traffic circles. Wikipedia still lists 64 of them, but 20 are marked as defunct, and 15 more as modified (traffic lights, etc.). By the mid-1950s the state no longer approved of their use. Part of the problem was: who had the right of way? It made sense that the car in the intersection should have the right of way or the circle would soon max out capacity. But what do you do when a major highway runs through the circle? I once asked the right of way question to a state trooper friend. His reply was that, in an accident, they would just give tickets to both drivers and let the courts figure out the blame.

New Jersey's first circle was built in 1925 in nearby Pennsauken. It was known as the "airport circle" since an airstrip adjoined it (until around 1960). How's that for an additional traffic distraction/hazard,  piper cubs buzzing your rooftop while zipping between cars trying to go in other directions?

Well when the two Westville roads cross the Timber Creek they are dumped into the twin Brooklawn circles, an odd affair separated by a short attached road section divided by the PRSL overpass (girder bridge). These circles have memories attached. I once hit one with my High School Driver Training car. (Not my fault, the instructor kept distracting me with his "watch out for that car" shouts.) Now who could possibly leave that out of their area modeling?

Anyway here's the early efforts for modeling the Brooklawn twin circles, greatly shrunken with a lot of work left to do. The overpasses need girder bridges (and the roadbed removed). The PRSL needs to have a trestle installed over Timber Creek, the Bachmann cars need to be replaced with CMWs and the Buzby Bros. cement plant needs to be built and installed. A Walthers Medusa kit will hold the fort for the short term. An N scale version of the Faller or IHC cement plants would be much better - if they existed.

The prototype track had to be bent to allow me to turn the room corner and prepare for the "Great River Crossing" of the twin loft windows.