Notes on Designing, Building, and Operating Model Railroads
A hobby adventure
I made a road trip recently to visit a few Pre-Depression Era modelers here in the great Southwest. I had been threatening to visit one of them for a couple of years and the timing worked out. It was a lot of driving across miles and miles and miles of desert, but it was worth it!
Operating model railroads with friends is one of my favorite aspects of the hobby. The holidays can be a tough time for crew to attend so there is a lag between sessions. I did host a December session on my Wheeling Freight Terminal but I hadn’t been to Mike Weiss’ Kingston Southern layout for a couple of months. It was great to kick off the New Year operating his layout.
In May, I returned to Morgantown, WV, to celebrate with my daughter and daughter-in-law as they received degrees from West Virginia University. Before hitting the road, I contacted Michael Hohn to coordinate a visit. Michael and I have been long time members of the Mon Valley Railroad Historical Society, and we have bounced home layout ideas around. A visit date was set up quickly.
I recently returned from a couple weeks of travel back in the Mid-Atlantic Region. As mentioned here a couple posts ago, I attended the RPM Valley Forge event. After things closed up, several home layouts were open for a self-guided tour. I stopped by to visit a couple of layouts on my way out of town.
I moved to El Paso, Texas, in the summer of 2012 and began to seek out local model railroaders. I attended a local NMRA meeting and met Mike who was building an HO scale home layout in nearby Las Cruces, NM. His layout had progressed well and he hoped to begin operating soon. I offered to assist with any tasks to keep the progress rolling and ended up visiting a couple of times a month. Over the next year, the mainline was completed, a yard was installed, an industrial branch was installed, and operating sessions were set up. Mike now hosts once a month sessions on his layout and a few local model railroaders participate. Click on any image here to review a large size.