The Gateway Warehouse, formally called Buffalo International Transfer Warehouse, was a HO Scale micro layout of a Bonded Transfer Warehouse somewhere along the waterfront in Buffalo, New York.
It was 3 feet 10 inches x 12 inches in size, and the warehouse served as a customs agency for nearby industries in Canada and the US. The reason Buffalo was originally chosen was because it could host B&O, Chessie and CP / CN traffic realistically as B&O had lines to Buffalo, C&O went through Ontario, and CP also went through Ontario. The warehouse had its own reporting mark (BIX), but owned no motive power or rollingstock.
In 2017, after re-configuring the layout, I was able to physically connect this layout to the Dolton / Illinook / Barr modules via the Dolton Junction and some extra modules, creating the ability to have cars moved to and from it from other parts of the layout without having to use my hands to physically move cars between this module and other modules. As part of that reconfiguration, it was also ‘moved’ from Buffalo,NY to Calumet City,IL and was renamed “Gateway Warehouse” after a real warehouse in the Calumet City area with that name, but in 2018 the module was once again separated from the main layout by necessity.
Inspiration for the layout came from various small layout ideas, including the Inglenook, Shortover Yard, and the Tuning Fork layout concept. Mostly these ideas came from the late Carl Arendts website, and the many innovative ideas contained in the Small Layout Design Yahoo group.
The locale the layout represents and the selection of industry for the layout was carefully chosen to maximise virtual interchange traffic through the MRICC Yahoo Group.