New York Railways 86X Route

By Alfred Barten

This is a project I began in 2002 and am just getting around to finishing. (I suppose this is another justification for never throwing anything away!) It began as an attempt to build some Third Avenue Railway System (TARS) convertible streetcars using Rail3D. At the time, R3D was best known as a 3D isometric-view railway simulator with DirectX capabilities. I enjoyed laying track and setting up automatic running transit systems using some of the rolling stock that is no longer available (and, apparently, I DID throw away). The new R3D is all DirectX now, but I still enjoy the old format. I also get a kick out of building rolling stock with nothing but a text editor (Notepad will do, but the R3D Stock Editor includes a handy preview mode).

86X Crosstown Route

Needing someplace to run my TARS convertibles, I chose the 86th Street Crosstown route because it offered an interesting mix of running from the East River, across the East Side of Manhattan, through Central Park, to a stub terminus at the edge of the park at Manhattan’s West Side. It was also a relatively short route and – best of all – it ran close to the place where we once lived, the corner of 90th and Lexington. (I haven’t shown Lexington on the map, but it’s between Park Avenue and Third Avenue.) The route was the last NY Railways line in operation, closing in 1936, a few years before I was born.

I think the route is an excellent candidate for modeling in a number of sims, not just R3D. My information source was a map in the book New York Railways: The Green Line, published by NJ International.

I suppose, to be technically correct, I should now build some Green Line cars. Plans are available in the above-mentioned book.

Meanwhile, I’ve placed the cars and route in a zipped package at the VR Downloads page.

The route as I’ve built it thus far, is basically a sketch. I’ve outlined where buildings should go and where the park is. There’s still plenty of modeling to be done here.

TARS Convertibles

TARS had hundreds of fully convertible cars, built by Brill in 1909 and 1911. The cars I modeled were from the 1911 batch, numbered 201 through 300. Drawings are in the Carstens Traction Planbook. I modeled the car in four versions: with and without panels and with and without trolley pole. Cars running in Manhattan drew power from a conduit between and below the rails. Cars running in the Bronx and Westchester County drew power from overhead trolley wire via trolley pole. I’ve included all four with the 86X download package, but only incorporated the two non-pole cars in the route.

Building rolling stock in R3D is fairly simple, though potentially tedious, if you don’t mind working with numbers. Most lines of code look like this:

Fill     20,5,0     10,5,0     10,5,40     20,5,40     255,0,0     =

Where Fill indicates a color is to be applied; each of the first four groups of numbers represents coordinates of a plane surface; the last group of numbers represents the color amounts of red, green, and blue; and the = sign indicates the color is to be applied to be sides of the plane.


TARS 201: panels removed, no pole.


TARS 204: panels in place, pole up.

There’s no need for me to go into the entire construction process here because Mark Hodson has created an excellent manual that can be downloaded from the R3D web site along with the program, which is listed under the Previous tab at the web site.

Along the Line I’ve shown just two shots to give an idea of how this barebones route looks. You can also zoom out for an overview, shown at the top of this article.


Central Park West stub terminal.


86th Street crossing at Second Avenue.

I haven’t tried my TARS convertibles with the new R3D, but I expect them to work just fine.

Meanwhile, I’m going to just sit back and watch the cars run!

Al