I am the principal stockholder of the Norton's Point and Cross Brooklyn Railway, a street railway operating from the southern section of mostly residential Brooklyn to the northern industrial section of THE City's largest borough.  The Company operates regularly scheduled street car service with hand-me-downs from the New York City Transportation Department, and a twice-a-day freight service with an old Alco S-1 and a GE 44-tonner inherited from its one-time parent, The Pennsylvania Railroad, starting and/or ending at the Brooklyn Terminal Market which provides most of NP&CB revenue.

I'ts early Spring 1956 and the handwriting is on the wall with the appearance of GM buses on some of the cross streets replacing the trolleys. In addition to the NP&CB there are only three trolley lines left in the borough - all operating PCC's, all doomed.

The streets  are all chewed up and the ruts on either sides of the rails require both pedestrian and vehicular traffic to exercise extreme caution when crossing, but the Company struggles on.

We're more than sixty years away from gentrification and the neighborhoods through which the NP&CB cross show the signs of wear.  They were never upscale and the stores - the groceries and bakeries and butcher shops -all show it.

The miniature world representing my youth, my world is really a time capsule.