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Model railroads are like their real-world counterparts; they can suffer downturns in traffic and business. Last night, our club ops were sparsely attended. Where sometimes we’ll have 20+, maybe upwards of thirty people, this time we only had a dozen. Member’s wives where in recovery, people had to work their crummy recession-desperate jobs, it was summer, something was on the tube, whatever. As a friend told me when he drove in and saw the cars in the parking lot, he thought “Uh oh.” But the layout was clean and we were here and trains were coupled up, so we figured […]

The Stuyvesant Poolsburgh & Kinderhook railroad had its shakedown ops today. It’s a slick space-age layout with optional computer control of trains (in fact, during the session, the RDC line (small interurban transports) ran across their own line and met at the Stuyvesant Central Station). It’s pretty much a passenger effort, lots of station stops, mostly double-tracked main (other than one death-defying tunnel where the line is single track). Train handling is superior to anything I’ve seen in N-scale. Of course, that’s not to say we didn’t have problems (it was a shakedown session, after all). At first, everyone was […]

I start to forget how far the group has come with model railroad ops. Oh, we’re not those super-prototype groups that do everything by the book (that’s what November at Tehachapi will be about). But over the years, everyone has learned to work radios and throttles simultaneously, and to generate more solutions than problems. And with my dispatcher program, I can keep the railroad moving like an air-traffic controller. So just as contrast helps to define, we had a visitor at Doc’s session today, a nice gentleman from England. He’d come to the club last Wednesday and the offer had […]