Northlandz Welcome Page

Northlandz grew out of the enormous model railroad that Bruce Williams Zaccagnino first built in the basement of his home in Three Bridges, New Jersey. In 1991 he moved the layout to its present site near Flemington, in Raritan Township, and kept expanding it through the 1990s until it spanned more than 50,000 feet of track; in 1997 Guinness recognized it with the world record for the longest small-scale model railway track, a mark that stood until Hamburg's Miniatur Wunderland set a new record in 2005. The layout is unusual among big exhibitions for climbing vertically rather than sprawling outward, with over 100 trains threading sculpted landscapes, and a functional railroad operates outside the building as well. After Zaccagnino retired, the property changed hands and came close to being demolished, but the new owner, Tariq Sohail, was struck by the layout's detail and scenery and chose to keep it; the renovated attraction reopened in October 2019. Its origins are captured in the eleven-minute documentary short Some Kind of Quest.