We had fun this weekend. The Houston S Gaugers were invited to set up
our layout at the Galveston Railroad Museum. This was an all-weekend
event that they held as a grand re-opening to bring people into the
museum after they sustained quite a bit of damage due to Hurricane Ike
in September 2008. The last time I had been in the museum was about 10
or 12 years ago and I did not notice much of a difference, so they did a
fantastic job getting everything back. Bob Werre mentioned that one of
the cars in their yard had a "water mark line level" marked on the
outside to indicate how far the equipment was under water. I did not see
it, but from what he indicated it must have been 7 feet or more.
Due to our layout's size and due to the large number of vendors they had
at the show, we, along with one HO-scale club and the local G-scale club
had to set up outside, but under a covered area. Some of our members
went down on Friday evening to set up just the modules (no electrical).
We then all showed up around 7am on Saturday morning, and we had trains
running by about 9:30. Turn out was pretty good. It was hot and not much
of a breeze on Saturday. However, overnight Saturday a cold front moved
in. Sunday morning we found our skirting being shredded, blowing in 30
mile per hour gusts of wind. We had put our equipment and structures
inside the museum Saturday before we left. The wind prevented us from
putting anything but a couple of small structures on the layout. We had
one freight car train and one passenger train running. Any "extra"
equipment we normally put on the layout in its yards were kept off of
the layout after on of Bob's boxcars was blown off of the layout and was
turned into partial kit for him to re-assemble this week. Turnout was
quite a bit less on Sunday, but it picked up a bit in the afternoon as
the sun came out and warmed things up a bit.
My freight train ran all day Saturday behind an A.M. FA-2, and all day
Sunday behind the Railmaster RS-1. Absolutely no problems until about
4:30pm (thirty minutes before shut-down) yesterday when the wind blew my
cabin car (caboose) over and was subsequently hit by the oncoming
passenger train.
It was the club's first outdoors set-up in a good number of years, and
my first. I'm not sure we are going to want to do that again any time soon.
- Peter.
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Peter Vanvliet ([email protected])
Houston, Texas
My Model Railroad Site <http://pmrr.org/> (RSS feed
<http://pmrr.org/rss.xml>)
Fourth Ray Software <http://fourthray.com/>
Houston S Gaugers <http://houstonsgaugers.org/>
N.A.S.G. <http://nasg.org/>
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