Maine Central, Lamoille Valley

Maine Central, Lamoille Valley
Click image to link to my web site, nekrailroad.com

Friday, November 29, 2013

Busy November!

Coming back from the Laconia NER Convention, I stowed the modules under the layout, covered them with plastic and prepared for the open houses in November. This involves general cleaning up, preparing the run through trains with (hopefully) reliable freight cars that are good to run for 5 hours start each day, and putting up the assorted signs and info that othert model railroaders like to peruse to understand what the layout is all about.

I had about 75 visitors over the first two days, a Sunday followed by a Saturday. Good weather may have impacted the numbers a bit, and with only a bit of publicity this year, probably less of the general public. Certainly there were plenty of return visitors that were good to see. Bill Rose reminded me that I still have not built the ET&HK Ide building yet, as he does each year! I also had a few children and one that quite literally demanded to run a train. Once I prepared a Lamoille Valley passenger extra for him, he settled in and ran the train quite nicely, paying attention to speed and even stopping at the station in Sheldon Jct.

As usual, I did not remember to take too many pictures, but I did get one when there were about 5 people looking around things. Only two can actually be seen however...including Bryan who visits each year and was able to get his Dad down as well.

During the open house, just one picture taken. I always forget to take pictures and get busy talking to everyone!

The following weekend saw about 80 nor so members of the NJ Division NMRA stop by after the local Division Meet. This was a much more crowded and question filled day, but still lots of fun.

I closed out the month by getting a visit in to Ken McCorry's layout. It had been about 8 years or so since I had been there, back when it was Conrail and Penn Central. Now all Pennsy, the layout is just as big as I recall it, and perhaps larger. One picture I took was this quite impressive dispatchers "office". That's a lot of layout to dispatch!

2 chairs probably means 2 dispatchers which equals Big layout!