Anybody know what’s going on witht he group of modelers that are (or were) users/owners of the Pacific Southern model railroad in Rocky HIll (suburb of Princeton) NJ? They still have a little notice in the mags stating they are a large club converting to DCC and are looking for new blood. They used to have a website but that appears that’s gone bye-bye.
I know there were some personality conflicts amongst the guys and between that and the conversion to DCC they haven’t had any holiday shows for a few years now, but at least the website still existed. Hopefully they haven’t had problems with all the rain we’ve gotten in Joisey this year - my basement got flooded out twice in 3 weeks in August when the sewers backed up. Thanks, Trenton Water Works (they do the sewers too).
I am a member of the Garden State Division, North East Region, NMRA, and was there at the club on Sat Oct 2, '10 as part of the layout tour connected to the Mid East Region convention in Princton and we will be having our(GSD) Jan '11 Buisiness meet there. They have sucsessfully converted to NCE DCC, and I will have a chance to opperate there then. Let you know more as soon as I know more.
Thanks for the reply - thought this thread was dead. Good to know the club is still around. Do you know if they have an active website or not? The old one has been long dead and gone to the bit bucket. They used to advertise for members in RMC (don’t know about MR as I dropped that mag some time back) and the ad showed the old website at http://www.pacificsouthern.org/
Miss their holiday shows.
Has anyone heard about this club? It’s getting late in the year and I wanted to take my kids there.
Anything?
Charlie
They haven’t had Christmas public shows in years. The website is http://www.pacificsouthern.org/
Kind of sad.
I used to be a junior member when I lived in Central New Jersey and was a member sporadically until about 2003. Haven’t been there since do to my relocation out of NJ. I was there during the last year they had an open house. From my point of view, part of the reason for ending the show was that after 40 or so years the show’s popularity had run it’s course. Prior to the last year, attendance was really down to the point where some of the hourly shows were down to 5 or 10 people as oppose to 40 or 50 being the lowest during any of the given hourly shows. Just a little background, for two Saturdays and Sundays in December the club opened it’s doors to the public and had scheduled 50-minute shows once every hour on the hour between 10am and 5pm. Due to the lack of parking at the club’s location so shuttle vans were used to transport visitors from a local vocational school just down the road to the club’s layout. So once the show started, the audience was stuck at the layout until the end of the show. The show was mainly just a 50-minute sequence of scheduled train movements around the layout; all through trains (passenger/freight), no switching. Except of approximately 30 feet of single track mainline, the layout had about 500 feet of mainline running which kept trains running with nonstop action (except when derailments occurred which always seems to happen at in opportune times and places… funny how that sometimes happens).
Anyway, i believe the reason the club board decided to end the shows was mainly because attendance was way down. There was also some talk about the show disrupted the normal non-show operating and the usual need to rush to finish certain projects in time for the show which lead to so short cuts being taken to speed up the process. At any rate, I think the time off has allowed the club to make major upgrades to the layout (electrical, track, scenery) without the need to “rush” things along just to have an open house.&
As of Dec 2011 Pacific Southern MRR Club is still going okay in Rocky Hill NJ. I’ve attended their evening meetings several times now and am considering joining this club.
IMO they have a large, intricate, beautiful layout… There’s a central dispatcher and three separate yard bosses controlling the trains’ schedules on a computerized system. Individual cab operators follow their trains around using plug-in DCC controllers, and also set switches and signals. It’s all beautifully landscaped, and also has operational signal blocks that must be obeyed. Passenger trains run on time to various stations, and freight runs are switched in several large yards by operators following waybill instructions.The layout is large enough to run a consist of 15 passenger cars or 100 freight cars at a time behind varied locomotive power, and there is a short trolley system operating on overhead wire!
I find it all somewhat intricate and tricky and it will take a newbie like myself some time to learn the ropes. But I’ve also found the current members to be friendly and helpful and very willing to teach and guide new members…
Skip Leib
Skip:
Thanks for the follow-up. As I read it you say you’re new to the club but I wonder if you could pass this thought along: could they possibly have someone update the club’s web page? It doesn’t look like anything has been done with it in a long time. The sections with the pictures, track plan, etc. have been empty for some time. Maybe they could put up a little news item on how the club is doing, etc.
Good to see they got the DCC stuff working as that old control system they had looked like it was a real piece of work to keep going.