Rails on Wheels - Operations Roadshow

This page is updated periodically to report on the progress we have made on the development and construction of the Operations Road Show layout in 2006 and 2007. The updates from years prior to 2006 have been moved to their own page.

Owing to the scope of this project, these reports do not necessarily contain everything which is going on or has been accomplished at a particular time.

July 24, 2010

The ORS core team attended the 2010 NMRA National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While we did not bring the ORS layout this year, Jeff Fryman presented his clinic on setting up paperwork for operations twice to receptive audiences. John Young presented a new clinic on the planning process for his future N scale layout based on the C&O's Toledo Subdivision in 1968 to a very engaged audience. At the convention we all registered for Grand Rails 2012, the 2012 NMRA National Convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rails 2012 is our next planned trip out with the ORS layout.

Scenery work continues, but at a slower pace, as freight car maintenance has begun (mostly matching up broken ladders and stirrups with the appropriate rolling stock). David Pickell and Bill Abraham constructed a 208-tree capacity drying rack for Supertrees. We picked up a number of cartons of the raw materials for these trees at the National Train Show. Our next operating session is scheduled for early August.

March 26, 2010

Having reached the point where we've used some of our turnouts enough that they are showing signs of wear, we've started work on fixing the ones that aren't aging gracefully. So far, we've used PC board ties to reinforce three that were going out of gauge, and replaced the throw bars on a couple where the solder joints holding the points in place were failing. Given the amount of use these have gotten over six years of frequent operation, we're neither surprised nor especially concerned by this.

Rockfield is the focus of current scenery efforts, but a manually-activated set of crossing flashers has been put in place at the west end of the siding at Buck Creek, too.

Feburary 13, 2010

We've held one operating session so far in 2010. Some trackwork projects are under way to fix finicky turnouts, and the trackage at the farm co-op and supply at the east end of Delphi has been rearranged to try to get the locals through town a little quicker. An additional siding at Logansport is under consideration to help relieve yard congestion there.

December 29, 2009

The layout was back up and operating shortly after Thanksgiving, and we've held our first post-Hartford operating session. During that session and on subsequent worknights, we've identified a number of minor things that were damaged in transit and will need to be repaired. We've also realized that we've been neglecting some basic maintenance on our motive power. Over the next few months we will be taking apart each locomotive and putting its drive train through a cleaning and lubrication process. This will be a good opportunity to weed out any remaining "fringe" DCC decoders that may still be out in our fleet, that don't play well with others.

October 12, 2009

Following the installation of additional lighting in the layout room, we have begun standing modules back up on their feet as we reassemble the layout this Fall. While we do not have an official timetable for resuming operating sessions at this time, we expect that we should be back up and running within a few weeks.

The recent theft of the Rails on Wheels club trailer containing nearly all of the club's display layout modules will have little immediate impact on the Operations Road Show project. Very little of the small amount of equipment used in common between the ORS layout and the Rails on Wheels display layout was in the trailer at the time.

July 3-12, 2009

Our trip to the NMRA National Convention in Hartford, Connecticut was our longest expedition ever with the Operations Road Show layout, racking up over 1,400 miles in the course of the round trip.

After a quick breakfast at our usual Saline dining spot, we hit the road pretty much right on schedule, about 9:15am, with two pickup trucks and a large SUV pulling three trailers, ranging in length from 14 to 18 feet. We made it nearly twenty miles before a loose screw on the rental trailer dislodged itself and punctured a tire while traveling at speed down the freeway. Replacing it with one of our spares set us back about half an hour. The rest of our day's travel, to Hazelton, Pennsylvania, was uneventful, if a bit long.

We started the Fourth of July with a quick run up I-81 to the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton. After a five hour visit and a thorough viewing of the Site's exhibits and collection, we continued on to Hartford, arriving in the early evening.

We spent the fifth of July unloading the trailers, setting up the layout and preparing it for operation, with the help of assistants provided by the OpSIG. The Hartford Convention Center staff were also very helpful. That night, Jeff Fryman gave the first of two presentations of his clinic on developing paperwork for your model railroad operations.

Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, we ran three, three-hour-long operating sessions for Convention attendees. On Wednesday, we held only one, scheduled so as minimize conflict with the Layout Design SIG's self-guided layout tour. The time went by quickly: even though nine hours of operation each day is a lot of work, it is also a lot of fun.

The sessions were well attended, with only one or two operating positions going vacant out of the 120 we offered. We met many enthusiastic crews, many of whom were operating for the first time, and many experienced operators who were interested in seeing how we do it. We renewed acquaintances with crews who had run with us at previous conventions and met plenty of new folks, a number of whom left expressing interest in taking up operation after never having tried it before. A particularly fortuitous find was Rich, a 12 year-old from New York who attended one of the Monday sessions and stayed around to assist with several more. He picked up our operating methods quickly and was running like a pro in minutes. This guy is a natural.

It is the people that really make this rewarding, and we met a lot of really neat people this week.

On Monday afternoon, a crew from WTIC television (channel 61 in Hartford) stopped by to film activity on the layout. Footage of our layout was used behind the interviews and in the station's coverage of the NMRA National Convention that evening. During our sessions later in the week, we were visited by the film crew from Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine, a new online model railroading magazine. We hope that some of the footage will appear in their coverage of the Convention.

During the week, we tested out the new Digitrax DT402D duplex radio throttle and UR92 transceiver, mainly in the Fiddle Yard where we make and break consists while building outbound trains and breaking down inbound ones. It worked flawlessly, and played well with our existing UR91/DT400R/UT4R simplex radio system.

Thursday morning, Fritz Milhaupt participated in a panel discussing the merits of an active fiddle yard over passive staging, sponsored by the Layout Design SIG. Following the Thursday evening operation session, we spent two hours packing up parts of the layout and preparing for the big tear-down.

Friday dawned with two hours of tear-down and packing before heading off to the National Train Show at 9:00am. About 1:00pm we reconvened and finished loading the trailers, again with help from OpSIG volunteers, by 6:00pm.

Saturday morning, after allowing ourselves some time to sleep in, we hit the train show again for a few hours. The rental trailer had sustained some damage to its roof vent while we were in Hartford, and the weather forecast promised rain across most of Pennsylvania, so John Young, Al Robertson, Jeff Fryman and Bob Milhaupt spent a couple of hours working on a repair. Many thanks are due the staff of the Hartford Convention Center for their assistance with our repairs in our hour of need. We were out by about 2:00. After a long afternoon and evening of travel, which included several hours of mountainous driving through north-central Pennsylvania in a heavy thunderstorm, we tied up for the night in DuBois.

Sunday morning we got an early start. A quick check showed that our repair work in Hartford had been successful- no water had infiltrated the rental trailer. We took our time crossing Pennsylvania and Ohio, arriving back in Saline at approximately 4:25pm.

Without question, this was the best set-up we have had. The support from the OpSIG and the Hartford National 2009 Convention Committee far exceeded any that we have received before. The additional manpower provided by the OpSIG helped to take a good deal of the pressure off of us, and was greatly appreciated. Their assistance in turn helped us to contribute to making the Hartford National 2009 Convention the thoroughly enjoyable experience we felt it to be.

After getting home, several of us immediately set to work to prepare to take another layout, Rails on Wheels' display layout, to Train Festival 2009 in Owosso, Michigan over the weekend of July 23-26.

We have some room improvements planned for this summer, so the layout is not likely to go back up before mid-September, with operating sessions resuming a few weeks after that.

July 3, 2009

We departed for the NMRA National Convention in Hartford, Connecticut at approximately 9:15am.

June 29, 2009

June 21, 2009

Over the past week, we have begun dismantling the layout and packing equpment. The trailers are back from being inspected, and both received a clean bill of health for our trip out East.

May 19, 2009

On May 3, we held our final operating session prior to starting the tear-down and packing process for our trip to the NMRA Hartford National Convention in July. A significant reason for allowing so much time for tear-down and packing is that we will be building new racking for the modules, since we now have to provide clearance for scenery that we have added since our trip to Cincinnati in 2005.

February 1, 2009

The Operations Road Show layout is featured as the cover story in the February 2009 issue of Scale Rails, the National Model Railroad Association's monthly magazine.

Inside this issue is an eight-page article describing the philosophy, history and mechanical details on this project, and promoting its upcoming appearance at the NMRA National Convention in Hartford, Connecticut this summer. We feel that the editorial and production staff did a very nice job with the material that we provided for this article.

We are counting down the last operating sessions we will hold this Winter and Spring before we begin teardown and packing for the National Convention this summer. Plenty of scenery work remains to be done as well.

December 7, 2008

Scenery work continues. We've become very enamored of the products Silflor makes, as well as some of the Noch and Heki scenery products which don't get much exposure in North America. "Static grass", as described in Peter Ross' article "Model Realistic Tall Grass" in the May 2006 issue of Model Railroader, has provided a solution to a couple of our scenery dilemmas, and we are going through Scenic Express's Supertrees like crazy.

When you have nearly 400 linear feet of layout, you end up using a huge amount of scenery material.

October 7, 2008

As the summer ended, we ramped up the scenery work. More buildings are being built for installation at Burrows, and the scenery which started at Buck Creek has begun to spread westward in the direction of Lafayette. We are addressing other touch-ups and some equipment maintenance.

Several new locomotives are having decoders installed and being detailed and painted to add more "Beautiful Blue" to our 1964-era Wabash fleet and give it a look more representative of the last days of the Wabash. We are also starting to look at different methods to handle signaling at the various crossings with other railroads along the line and, of course, at Lafayette Junction.

Things are coming together for the Operations Road Show layout to hold operating sessions at the "Hartford National 2009" NMRA National Convention, to be held July 5-11, 2009 in Hartford, Connecticut. We are still working out details and recruiting help. Our fourth appearance at an NMRA National Convention will be the farthest we have taken the layout, and it will be a bigger undertaking than any trip we have tried before.

September 30, 2008

Our operating session for the "Fast Freight '08" NCR NMRA Regional Convention went off without a hitch. While we had hoped to hold two operating sessions, the sign-up for the Thursday night operating session fell short of the number we needed to run the layout, so we chose to cancel it and focus our effort on the Sunday afternoon session. Six guests came up from Toledo to run on the Wabash, and all appeared to have a good time.

August 7, 2008

We are offering operating sessions in conjunction with Fast Freight '08, the North Central Region NMRA's 2008 Convention, based in Toledo, Ohio. Our sessions will be held in Saline, Michigan on Thursday evening, September 18, and Sunday afternoon, September 21.

July 7, 2008

Work on the layout has slowed as the weather has warmed up. Scenery work continues. It looks as if we'll only get in two operating sessions before Labor Day, one each in July and August.

David Pickell and Fritz have begun work on a "Speed Curve Raceway" to use to automatically adjust the speed curves in our locomotives' decoders so that we can ensure that similar locomotives run well together. We started by using the design and JMRI scripts published by Phil Klein and Kent Williams at http://ownrymrr.blogspot.com/2006/03/triple-header-and-test-track.html, and have begun work to further refine the script.

January 19, 2008

We held one more operating session in October. The layout ran well, and we broke in a new crew in the Fiddle Yard-- Tim Young and David Pickell acquitted themselves well in that often-challenging duty, freeing up Al and Fritz to operate out on the road.

Scenery work continues at Buck Creek and Burrows. Al and John have been making great progress working westbound from Buck Creek. Things have been going much more slowly at Burrows.

Bob located a very nice network cable tester for us to use, and built a pair of inserts to allow us to use it with the RJ12 Loconet cable. The new tester, a Paladin 1579 Cable Check he bought at the Fry's Electronics in Downer's Grove, Illinois, can be used to test cables before they are installed. Using a remote piece, we can also test them after they have been hung underneath the layout. We went through the Loconet cabling beneath the layout and identified two connectors which had at least one pin that would go "open" intermittently, and two cables which were wired incorrectly. We repaired the cables and they test out correctly, now.

We've added more rolling stock that is appropriate for our 1964 era, and begun removing some of the less-detailed equipment and identifying more equipment to remove which we don't feel is really appropriate for our era and locale.

There are not a lot of operating sessions scheduled between now and the end of April, due to operating commitments at other layouts and, again, travel plans.

October 12, 2007

Wabash 479 leads an eastbound passenger train into Buck Creek

During one of our operating sessions during Great Lakes Express 2007, it was pointed out to us that guests less than about 5 feet tall could not always see one of the four LocoNet Fast Clocks we have located on top of the backdrops at the corners of the layout. Based on that observation, we acquired a large LocoNet Fast Clock and mounted it high on the west wall, where it is visible from nearly anywhere in our 30' by 60' layout room.

During September we held two operating sessions. Due to scheduling conflicts, we plan to hold only one more during October and November, with that session being held primarily for some guests from out of town.

Scenery work has resumed at Buck Creek and Burrows. Plans are in place to add the stretch of Indiana Highway 25 between Burrows and Rockfield. Highway 25 closely parallels much of the Logansport-Lafayette stretch of the Wabash.

Ongoing maintenance continues. During September we discovered our first cracked axle gear on an Atlas GP7. While we've encountered this before on Proto 2000 Geeps and Athearn Genesis F7s, this was the first time we'd seen it on an Atlas diesel.

August 6, 2007

Well, Great Lakes Express, the 2007 NMRA National Convention has been over for more than a week now, and we've begun to recover. Overall, we had a great time, and I think that the folks who came out to visit us did, too.

We hosted operating sessions Monday and Tuesday night for OpSIG members. Monday night we had a full house at a dozen participants, and Tuesday night only six. We could tell that things were going well by the amount of good-natured laughter we heard among the visiting crews.

Tuesday morning we bussed twelve people out for a hands-on clinic/training session in timetable and train order operation. Our afternoon session hosted six students.

Wednesday, the Ann Arbor Supertour brought about 40 people to see the layout. The planned afternoon bus tour was canceled.

The ORS layout was the host of the LDSIG layout tour picnic dinner Wednesday afternoon. We had at least 80 people visit, including some of the big names in model railroad operations. The weather held back long enough that nobody got too wet in the picnic tent.

During the LDSIG tour, we received inquiries about taking the ORS layout to give timetable & train order operation clinics at the NMRA National Convention in Hartford, Connecticut in 2009. We'll see how that develops- it's too early to say. We're hoping to take it to Milwaukee in 2010, and going out two years in a row might be a bit much, but we'll consider it. Grand Rapids in 2012 is a possibility, too, but it's still very early in the planning stages for that one...

July 22, 2007

Despite some uncertainty over the last few weeks, we now have enough people signed up for the OpSIG operating sessions on Monday and Tuesday night at the Great Lakes Express 2007 NMRA National Convention to be able to run them. As of Sunday morning, positions are still available- you can sign up at the OpSIG display in the SIGs Room (the Mackinac East ballroom).

Sign-up for the TT&TO clinics on Tuesday, while a little slower than we might have liked has been good, so we will have enough people to be able to hold both sessions. Some positions are still available.

May 22, 2007

We have installed a LocoNet Fast Clock in the crew room so that the off-duty crews can keep better track of when their call times are approaching.

We discovered that a track gauge issue on one of the turnouts in Peru was causing intermittent shorting when cars passed through, and corrected it.

Scenery work has been progressing more slowly than we'd like, but what we have in place is looking good.

Details are now available on the opportunities to come and operate on the Operations Road Show during the Great Lakes Express 2007 NMRA National Convention in Detroit.

February 3, 2007

We've begun engineering work on the signaling at Lafayette Junction. We're still investigating a number of ways of actually controlling it, and are working through exactly what signals are required.

Things are still not finalized for how operating session clinics on the ORS layout will be handled at the NMRA National Convention. We are hoping to manage it like a layout tour, but are waiting to hear back from the Convention Committee.

The freight house in Delphi has been relocated from the west end of town to adjacent to the passenger depot in the middle. This has allowed us to correct a track geometry problem through the old turnout that caused an unnecessarily tight bit of curvature on the mainline.

We've begun stockpiling trees for a foliating frenzy, to begin shortly.

Operations Road Show - Progress Report