MER Hagerstown: Day 1

In Hagerstown for the Mid Eastern Region NMRA convention, the Western Maryland Transfer. I headed south on Thursday to meet up with my modeling buddy Anton. As he lives minutes away from the MB Klein hobby shop, I was obliged to stop in and find something I needed! After finally getting a chance to see Anton's layout in person (CP Rail/CN present day theme), we headed west into the mountains. Rain fell the whole time I drove south and continued as we drove west, something that would repeat all weekend as it turns out.

We arrived at the convention hotel with just enough time to register before heading out to an operating session that night. We saw plenty of NJ Division people in the hotel lobby, and also had familiar faces join us on the operating session. We drove out to Mike Shockey's Great Northern themed layout. This was a fairly large layout with most track in place, but not too much scenery yet. We had a good time operating for a few hours. Even though we managed to run into trouble in the session right away, we did get through all the trains and had things running OK by the end of the night. A good first night, and thanks to Mike for hosting (a Capital's fan, but I won't hold that against him!) [Sorry, did not get any pics this first day to post]