ell, that’s done. The convention is history.

I gotta say I’m totally beat, having be involved in every minute of every event over the last week. I opened the gate for Saturday club cleaning, and closed it for the module drop off. And I did everything in between.

So think of this – over the last three days, twenty-four hours of it was convention center activity. For each of those hours, and the minutes and seconds contained within, two to five trains were in motion around our 30×40 layout. At one point we were up to nine. And for each of those trains, an engineer was plodding along them, running them.

Yeah, I must have walked many long slow miles over the last three days.

But it was fun. Saw a lot of trains. And I was pleased that we picked up three awards for our club (two for individual modules, one for a set of them). I got to see a lot of old friends and maybe discovered new ones (I know of at least one membership application (with money) that was accepted).

I also got to see other modules, and frankly, our swinging the main through the scenes, back and forth, really makes a difference. You get to see trains from different angles doing more than racing in straight lines.

And when it was winding down, I had a lot of folks there to help. We lined all the carry-boxes up, all in their back-side rest-points. And when 5pm rolled around, we had teams removing the curtains, striking the sign and the electronics mast, dropping the clamps. Then we rolled the racks into place and started racking them up. I think we were doing it perhaps a little fast but people were just excited to be through and moving fast, like a team of horses on the verge of running away with a cart. I did all I could to slow them down but still, with all the help and everyone in their correct places, we broke our record – nine minutes from a train still moving to everything in the racks and ready to roll. Everyone gave a cheer when the final rack was locked up. Matthew and I went to find how we could get our truck in (frankly, the NMRA didn’t believe that a “module” club could be ready to leave in ten minutes flat). When I was walking back, a member from another club was going the other way and said, “You and your fifteen minutes”. “Nine,” I smirked.

Rode over to the club and met the truck to stow everything away. And then I drove home. We pulled it off.

Next time, whoever proposes we do something like this will be in charge of it. Lesson learned.

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