Anybody want to share their experience at Trainfest, good, bad, or otherwise?
Thanks,
Mark
Well John Tews and his crew did the usual fine job of pulling it all together from the seeming chaos of set up early Friday. It is an amazing transformation. The Wisconsin Southeastern Division (WISE Division) of the NMRA depends on a successful Trainfest to fund our annual schedule of meets and activities.
There were some new products announced, and the Model Railroader part of this website has a good summary of them. For my personal interest the new product that looks the most promising is a Chicago & North Western GP9 of a later order with large fuel tanks and the air cylinders up on the roof. Some Yahoo group chatter suggests that Athearn heeded each and every last minute correction to what had been seen on some pre production samples to make this a remarkably accurate model. There was also relief that Athearn was able to resist (as Like Like alas was not) the temptation to put the short lived Route of the 400s/Route of the Streamliners slogans on the sides, thus considerably expanding the years for which the paint scheme is accurate.
Maybe the biggest news was the introduction of the “seceret” project that David Popp has been assigned to which is to create and introduce a much more robust and sophisticated video presence for Model Railroader magazine. A large HD screen at the Kalmbach booth showed extended samples and David was there for many more hours than most staffers devote to the booth to explain. I imagine there will be much more said about this soon but if I gleaned the message correctly, this is going to in many ways reverse the priority – where today you have the printed magazine and then this website supplements it with modest amounts of additional printed matter you can download and print yourself, and some supplementary videos of product reviews and a layout tour, with this new project the video version while perhaps not primary is going to be at least co-equal with particular emphasis on "how to/s