Tulsa 2016 Layout Design and Operations Weekend
On March 18-20, 2016 I attended the Tulsa Layout Design and Operations Weekend in Tulsa, OK. Behind the cut is a report with pictures on that weekend.
The basic format of the weekend is to arrive on Friday afternoon. Have an operating session from 1830 - 2130 that night. Get up the next morning to attend various lectures, eat a nice lunch and visit, then more lectures in the afternoon. Saturday evening is another operating session. Then Sunday morning have an operating session from 0900-1200. Plenty to do, but not too intense.
I arrived early enough in the afternoon to check into the hotel, pick up my registration credentials, eat a light supper and still be early to the first operating session. Unfortunately, I was not sharp enough to get any pictures of this layout, so I'll share a link to some online pictures. http://ldopsigmeet.tulsanmra.org/sp.php
The layout was the Southern Pacific-Donner Pass Railroad, owned by Jim Sinclair. I understand this layout started in another building on his property but his other hobbies needed more room so he built another out building to house it. As the description says, it's HO. I ended up at the left end of the main yard, as a yard engineer. The main yard had two yard engineers, plus his local operators providing yardmaster like duties, i.e. "do this first, then that . . ." The yard ran smoothly on my end. It was set up with a rotary switch to select turnout alignment for the yard ladder, and toggle switches to shift other turnouts. It was really pretty intuitive, and worked well. Unfortunately, I took my coat off, with my phone/camera when I put on my operations apron. Then I walked straight to my operating position and worked through past the scheduled end time. I didn't manage to even tour the layout. Silly me. But I did have fun, and I'd operate that layout again at the drop of a hat.
Saturday morning I woke up, had breakfast at the hotel, then off to the Shrine Temple for the day's seminars. The day's schedule had five one hour presentations listed.
The first was Kevin Blair on "The Dirty Harry School of Model Railroad Planning." Or "A mans got to know his limitations!" It was a good discussion of things that need to be considered in planning a new model railroad. The things included, time, money, space, energy, other responsibilites, etc.
Next up was Rich Gibson, talking on "New House, New Layout, New Prototype Modeled." Rich has had several job related moves over his career. The most recent was from Tulsa to Billings, MT. He was able to find a basement that met his modeling needs with a house above it. He decided to shift to a new prototype, actually a new branch of his favorite RR the Maine Central, this time modeling the Rockland Branch. He went through some of his prototype research, and the areas he wanted to model. He then shared how he was going to bend the branch into his new basement. Finally he showed us the progress. He's made lots of good progress in a short time. Looks like he'll be introducing model railroad operations to the Billings area fairly soon!
The final presentation of the morning was Stephen Priest, MMR. As most of you know, Stephen is the current editor of Railroad Model Craftsman, immediate past editor of the NMRA Magazine, a prolific author, esp. for the Santa Fe Railway Historic and Modeling Society, and an active member of Turkey Creek Division. The title of Stephen's morning presentation was "How the Prototype Influenced My Modeling." This sounds like it would be about road trips to take pictures. Turns out it was better than that. He addressed how to use the prototype to determine what to buy, thus saving money by not buying stuff you don't need. His specific example was locomotives. His focus was really on saving money, buy not buying stuff to put on the shelf. This process starts with making some decisions. What railroad/s am I going to model? What part of the railroad/s? When, as in what time frame? Given the answers to these questions you can then go to the prototypes records and find out what kind of locomotives were in use in your modeled area, and how many of each kind. Road power? Branch power? Yard Power? Passenger? Now you can start buying locomotives that will actually run on you layout and be correct for your pike.
Stephen Getting us thinking about saving money!
It's Lunch Time!! A BBQ lunch was included in the cost of registration. We went down stairs and enjoyed socializing over BBQ. I my case I also got to look over the layout plans for one of the Chisholm Trail Division's member,s new layout.
Steve Sandifer presented the first of the two afternoon seminars. His subject was Less than Carload Operations. He certainly opened my eyes about LCL movement! It turns out that about 25% of all box cars in 1950 were carrying LCL of some kind or the other. The LCL tranfer houses were huge nightly operations turning around several hundred cars each night. These movements were in addition to the REA moves as head end cars on passenger trains. If I were focusing our pike on Emporia yard rather than Newton yard, I'd have to rethink it a bit, as Emporia had a large LCL tranfer facility.
The final presentation was again Stephen Priest. This time an update on his new St Louis Division Model Railroad. I've now heard this presentation twice. It was worth my time both times. He provides good motivation and some good ideas for making progress your layout.
It's operations time!
My Saturday evening operations session was the Pandora & San Miguel, by Ken Ehlers. This is an Sn3 layout featuring narrow gauge operations in Colorado Sept 15/16 1942. How did he pick his dates?? Good question! Sept 15/16 are the dates he photographed the area for the pictures he used to create his backdrops. Great idea. This is the Rio Grande Southern between Ridgeway and Rico. This time I drew a way freight to operate. Kevin has his decoders set up so the max speed the model can achieve is about the max scale speed the prototype could achieve. This forces a slow paced struggle up the mountains. In my case I had a long enough train I had to use a helper throughout the trip. I had a great time. The link is the the pictures from the Tulsa websight. And a few pictures I took follow. http://ldopsigmeet.tulsanmra.org/psm.php
That's Ken on the right trying to solve some kind of problem we operators caused. The upper level is Rico. Ridgeway is the lower level on the left.
Moving around the end of the peninsula, and down the next aisle. Rico is still on top to to the left.
A detail shot of one of the industries along the route. In this case a saw mill.
Another detail shot, this time of part of the mine mill.
A beautiful trestle over one of several deep canyons.
The end of the line at Rico, looking back toward the Rico yard.
Another view of some of Ken's great scenery.
Sunday morning the operating session got it's start at a civilized 9 AM. I was going to operate an N Scale layout so I was excited to get going. The Layout was Dave Salamon's Deep River Southern. The layout is freelance set in 1958. I found myself running the industries near the main yard, then running various freights. This was a DC layout so extra care was needed when moving from power district to power district. Dave includes an interchange with the MoPac, via a smash board. The MoPac got there first so the smash board has to be moved each time the Southern crosses over. All turnout control is via choke cable type connections. They worked fine. The link is to Dave's online photo album. http://www.picturetrail.com/salamon
Looking at the back of the peninsula opposite the yard. The lower level is the mainline, the upper the branchline. The branch will have logging industry and be ready for operations soon. For this session, the branch operations ended at the cement plant behind me as I'm taking the picture.
An overall view of the yard area. You can see here that the layout is built into a second floor set of rooms. I worked the far end.
This is the far end of the yard from the previous picture. Ice House tracks in the very front, then the stub yard, the main and finally the local industries. Coordinating moves across the main, in and out of the AD tracks for the yard, and the facing and trailing point moves took some thought. Glad I'd had a couple of cups of coffee. Good fun.
This passenger, express, and freight area was at the near end of the yard in the overall view above. I also worked both the freight and express buildings. Even more coordination required.
Both Mr's Sinclair and Ehler emailed us copies of instructions to help get things going for the session. I always feel like I'm missing much in these instructions, but they do help get oriented quickly.
A huge thank you to all the folks in and around Tulsa who made this weekend worth the trip. I hope to be back in years to come.
Thanks for Reading
David
The basic format of the weekend is to arrive on Friday afternoon. Have an operating session from 1830 - 2130 that night. Get up the next morning to attend various lectures, eat a nice lunch and visit, then more lectures in the afternoon. Saturday evening is another operating session. Then Sunday morning have an operating session from 0900-1200. Plenty to do, but not too intense.
I arrived early enough in the afternoon to check into the hotel, pick up my registration credentials, eat a light supper and still be early to the first operating session. Unfortunately, I was not sharp enough to get any pictures of this layout, so I'll share a link to some online pictures. http://ldopsigmeet.tulsanmra.org/sp.php
The layout was the Southern Pacific-Donner Pass Railroad, owned by Jim Sinclair. I understand this layout started in another building on his property but his other hobbies needed more room so he built another out building to house it. As the description says, it's HO. I ended up at the left end of the main yard, as a yard engineer. The main yard had two yard engineers, plus his local operators providing yardmaster like duties, i.e. "do this first, then that . . ." The yard ran smoothly on my end. It was set up with a rotary switch to select turnout alignment for the yard ladder, and toggle switches to shift other turnouts. It was really pretty intuitive, and worked well. Unfortunately, I took my coat off, with my phone/camera when I put on my operations apron. Then I walked straight to my operating position and worked through past the scheduled end time. I didn't manage to even tour the layout. Silly me. But I did have fun, and I'd operate that layout again at the drop of a hat.
Saturday morning I woke up, had breakfast at the hotel, then off to the Shrine Temple for the day's seminars. The day's schedule had five one hour presentations listed.
The first was Kevin Blair on "The Dirty Harry School of Model Railroad Planning." Or "A mans got to know his limitations!" It was a good discussion of things that need to be considered in planning a new model railroad. The things included, time, money, space, energy, other responsibilites, etc.
Next up was Rich Gibson, talking on "New House, New Layout, New Prototype Modeled." Rich has had several job related moves over his career. The most recent was from Tulsa to Billings, MT. He was able to find a basement that met his modeling needs with a house above it. He decided to shift to a new prototype, actually a new branch of his favorite RR the Maine Central, this time modeling the Rockland Branch. He went through some of his prototype research, and the areas he wanted to model. He then shared how he was going to bend the branch into his new basement. Finally he showed us the progress. He's made lots of good progress in a short time. Looks like he'll be introducing model railroad operations to the Billings area fairly soon!
The final presentation of the morning was Stephen Priest, MMR. As most of you know, Stephen is the current editor of Railroad Model Craftsman, immediate past editor of the NMRA Magazine, a prolific author, esp. for the Santa Fe Railway Historic and Modeling Society, and an active member of Turkey Creek Division. The title of Stephen's morning presentation was "How the Prototype Influenced My Modeling." This sounds like it would be about road trips to take pictures. Turns out it was better than that. He addressed how to use the prototype to determine what to buy, thus saving money by not buying stuff you don't need. His specific example was locomotives. His focus was really on saving money, buy not buying stuff to put on the shelf. This process starts with making some decisions. What railroad/s am I going to model? What part of the railroad/s? When, as in what time frame? Given the answers to these questions you can then go to the prototypes records and find out what kind of locomotives were in use in your modeled area, and how many of each kind. Road power? Branch power? Yard Power? Passenger? Now you can start buying locomotives that will actually run on you layout and be correct for your pike.
Stephen Getting us thinking about saving money!
It's Lunch Time!! A BBQ lunch was included in the cost of registration. We went down stairs and enjoyed socializing over BBQ. I my case I also got to look over the layout plans for one of the Chisholm Trail Division's member,s new layout.
Steve Sandifer presented the first of the two afternoon seminars. His subject was Less than Carload Operations. He certainly opened my eyes about LCL movement! It turns out that about 25% of all box cars in 1950 were carrying LCL of some kind or the other. The LCL tranfer houses were huge nightly operations turning around several hundred cars each night. These movements were in addition to the REA moves as head end cars on passenger trains. If I were focusing our pike on Emporia yard rather than Newton yard, I'd have to rethink it a bit, as Emporia had a large LCL tranfer facility.
The final presentation was again Stephen Priest. This time an update on his new St Louis Division Model Railroad. I've now heard this presentation twice. It was worth my time both times. He provides good motivation and some good ideas for making progress your layout.
It's operations time!
My Saturday evening operations session was the Pandora & San Miguel, by Ken Ehlers. This is an Sn3 layout featuring narrow gauge operations in Colorado Sept 15/16 1942. How did he pick his dates?? Good question! Sept 15/16 are the dates he photographed the area for the pictures he used to create his backdrops. Great idea. This is the Rio Grande Southern between Ridgeway and Rico. This time I drew a way freight to operate. Kevin has his decoders set up so the max speed the model can achieve is about the max scale speed the prototype could achieve. This forces a slow paced struggle up the mountains. In my case I had a long enough train I had to use a helper throughout the trip. I had a great time. The link is the the pictures from the Tulsa websight. And a few pictures I took follow. http://ldopsigmeet.tulsanmra.org/psm.php
That's Ken on the right trying to solve some kind of problem we operators caused. The upper level is Rico. Ridgeway is the lower level on the left.
Moving around the end of the peninsula, and down the next aisle. Rico is still on top to to the left.
A detail shot of one of the industries along the route. In this case a saw mill.
Another detail shot, this time of part of the mine mill.
A beautiful trestle over one of several deep canyons.
The end of the line at Rico, looking back toward the Rico yard.
Another view of some of Ken's great scenery.
Sunday morning the operating session got it's start at a civilized 9 AM. I was going to operate an N Scale layout so I was excited to get going. The Layout was Dave Salamon's Deep River Southern. The layout is freelance set in 1958. I found myself running the industries near the main yard, then running various freights. This was a DC layout so extra care was needed when moving from power district to power district. Dave includes an interchange with the MoPac, via a smash board. The MoPac got there first so the smash board has to be moved each time the Southern crosses over. All turnout control is via choke cable type connections. They worked fine. The link is to Dave's online photo album. http://www.picturetrail.com/salamon
Looking at the back of the peninsula opposite the yard. The lower level is the mainline, the upper the branchline. The branch will have logging industry and be ready for operations soon. For this session, the branch operations ended at the cement plant behind me as I'm taking the picture.
An overall view of the yard area. You can see here that the layout is built into a second floor set of rooms. I worked the far end.
This is the far end of the yard from the previous picture. Ice House tracks in the very front, then the stub yard, the main and finally the local industries. Coordinating moves across the main, in and out of the AD tracks for the yard, and the facing and trailing point moves took some thought. Glad I'd had a couple of cups of coffee. Good fun.
This passenger, express, and freight area was at the near end of the yard in the overall view above. I also worked both the freight and express buildings. Even more coordination required.
Both Mr's Sinclair and Ehler emailed us copies of instructions to help get things going for the session. I always feel like I'm missing much in these instructions, but they do help get oriented quickly.
A huge thank you to all the folks in and around Tulsa who made this weekend worth the trip. I hope to be back in years to come.
Thanks for Reading
David