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.

Our merry band Thursday night,
before 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.
Thanks, guys!
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
The trailers have been packed, and we're almost ready to head east!
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
Operating sessions and scenery work resumed during September.
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.
News
and progress reports for years prior to 2007
have been moved to their own page.