New York Society of Model Engineers, Inc.

09/07/2026

With summer ending, we think that our best summer memory, and for thousands of other railfans, was seeing a Big Boy under steam. Here we 4014 pulling its consist through Valley Forge. #4014

09/06/2026

Check out this forgotten clip we had of an o scale 0-4-0 camelback running through the Jersey City trolley scene. The steam engine actually runs on battery power and its own remote control.

09/06/2026

Check out some Lego scale that we caught at Edison NJ this summer. This Lego group has some great creativity!

09/06/2026

One of the last great ones standing.

Walk in for one train car. Leave with a starter set, a book, and a basement full of dreams.

09/06/2026

Lightning crashes! Check out this Amtrak Turboliner at work!

09/06/2026

These Lehigh Valley FAs have this freight trains handled as they round the curve past Port Jervis.

09/05/2026

Erie Berkshire at speed on the O scale Union Connecting at NYSME.

09/04/2026

Any one have a hobby shop from Jersey you miss?

There was a time when the corner hobby shop was the most magical store on Main Street, a cramped little place where the shelves ran floor to ceiling with model kits, tiny paint jars, and box after box of HO scale train cars. 🚂 The bell over the door, the smell of glue and fresh balsa wood, the owner who knew every part in the place.

If you were a kid with a Saturday allowance, this was church. You saved up for weeks for a plastic model of a battleship or a hot rod, then spent a rainy weekend at the kitchen table gluing your fingers together and getting decals crooked. The lucky ones had a train layout in the basement that grew every Christmas, a little world of plaster mountains and painted villages built one paycheck at a time.

Those shops are almost all gone now, squeezed out by the big-box stores and then the internet. The kits still exist, but the place that made building them feel like an event, the guy behind the counter who steered you to the right glue, that is what we lost.

Did you build models or run a train layout as a kid, and which Jersey hobby shop kept you supplied?

09/02/2026

Do we have a runaway here? Watch to find out!