News

Well it was a little work and a little play today. Thanks to Devan and Jeff, all of the feeders are now soldered to the track. All of the wiring underneath was completed prior to arrival. Well it looks like there a few sections of track that need feeders so there are a couple more to be done. I hope to get to those tomorrow.

Thanks again to Phil the Tool Man who came through and helped with the switch machine slots. He also helped the other David with a module fix or two..... Something about different versions of dimensions.......

I also had a test locomotive to show all that had peculiar behavior. It was a bad truck on a new locomotive. But it only had problems in reverse. So remember when testing locomotives to go forward and reverse.

Well I am now wearing the sparky cap. Not because of any shorts, but because of no power at all. Well that has now been fixed, it was a question of poor labeling on the circuit board. So I have changed the leads around a little and wow, it does work!

So we now have 10 working modules under my roof. So from now on, there is no reason to not run trains at these meetings. Well we need to make sure there are a few corner modules too, but Jeff left a few just in case.....

Now the general question is were was everyone? Is Saturday a bad day for most of you? If Sunday would be better, we can easily move the meetings to Sunday. So please let us know if that is a better day.

I did unveil a new Athearn Challenger with full DCC and Sound today. And the bad sort that I am, you can never have just one. They are pretty nice units.

Devan got a beginners course on how to use the throttles and run a few trains, but he soon decided is was time to run to Bruce's and get some stuff to start working on scenery and possibly a train or two...... The addiction has begun. And I will take this time to say that Devan is a very lucky guy, He will never know all of the problems with DC and analog locomotives. He gets to start off with a clean slate on DCC. In many ways I am jealous!

So that is about it for today! I am not sure when the next meeting is, but we will be running trains then!

Respectfully,

David

About a year ago, the Great American Train Show came to Cal Expo. Several members from the club attended as a group, and while there were some nice layouts on display, there was only one small (but incredibly detailed) N scale layout. It was decided that we would be running trains at the next show.

Well, the GATS is now known as the Great Train Expo and returned to Cal Expo last weekend and we were there. After some initial electrical problems that haunted the layout on Saturday, Sunday went off almost without incident. Due to some great media coverage (in the Sac Bee and with channel 58 doing a live broadcast), Sunday was much busier than Saturday. All three lines on the layout had multiple trains running providing lots of action for the spectators. Even with the limited scenery done, there was an unending stream of positive comments. Even the venders and members from the other train groups came by and were excited to see what we had accomplished in such a short time. I know that the looks on some of the children's faces will stay with me forever. I also know that the money spent will be remembered for a long time too (I'll be eating cracker and catsup sandwiches for lunch for the next few months). In the end, the response was much better than I could have ever envisioned.

I can't thank David, Steve, Tom and (especially) Phil enough for all of their time and hard work. I don't want to speak for them, but just seeing the face on one child light up as they watched a train roll by was worth all of the time and effort. It was truly a wonderful experience.