Princeton Minnesota, a new club? HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Mybe I had my expectations too high?

But the first meeting of the new model train club was not a very informative meeting.

Here is what I do know.

25 people showed up including myself and my wife

I am a auto mechanic with a couple tons of tools, One gentleman has a layout in his basement in boxes. One gentleman is a computer geek (his words). One is an amatuer historian. All either have experience with model trains or layouts to some degree.

With the exception of 5 ten and under kids, I am the youngest by at least 15 years (38)

We will have at our disposal a 30x15 room in the old Princeton Depot building

The local historical society asked us to be there, It is an old depot with lots of historical antiques with almost none of them having to do anything with trains and they feel a layout would improve traffic.

The 2 people who set up the initial meeting are on the historical board.

There is a business Open House, to promote local businesses, coming up that the board members want to put a table up at and promote the club and possibly get some donations.

After the Open house the board wants to have a train show. they were dissapointed by the last show because it turned up only 3 layouts and 12 tables of people selling things. They do not like the idea of a swap meet and want more layouts.

I tried to get as much info as I could, but I feel I came up short, I should have asked the group more questions and pressed them untill I got answers.

I am planning to write up a queastionaire to get my answers and pass it out at the next meeting.

1 what scale layout?

2 what time period?

3 DC or DCC?

4 Local, State, Line (Hill, I think) or freelance layout theme?

5 Permanant or modular?

6 Everyone did agree to a constant loop but can we get a timesaver or some kind of switching game onto the layout?

My feeling is that it should be a DCC, modular, HO, in the steam to diesal tran

2

In regards to age, you’ll pretty much get what you get. I was in a club in Michigan whose regular attendees were pretty evenly spread out between highschoolers and retirees. Now here in Minnesota, I attend the Twin Cities Division meetings and I am in a similar situation. With the exception of a couple teenaged children of older members, I am 15 years younger than anyone else. Don’t be turned off by this. Older modelers often are fountains of knowledge. Take advantage of it.

Be grateful that you’ll have a nice space for a model railroad club. I assume it will be rent free. That is huge. You could spend $300 a month easily for a space that size. If you have 15 members, that is $20 a month each just for rent.

Given that Princeton is on a now abandoned GN mainline and your in the town’s depot, I assume there will be a strong preference to model that trackage. SPV’s Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North American shows that the line north from Princeton was abandoned by the GN while the line south from Princeton was abandoned by the BN. Thus I would imagine you would want to model a timeframe when the line was still in full use. I guess that would be the 40s or 50s.

It looks like modeling the entire line from Milaca to Elk River would fit nicely in the room you have if you go double deck. There are about 30 real miles between the two towns and 8 intermediate towns. Of course I have no idea what industries were in those towns and a couple may have been nothing more than a passing siding or spur.

Can you give any details about the club? I live 30 miles away. That’s not too far for me.

3

Sounds like fun.

I don’t know if you have been to other clubs or not. The club at Albany is sort of a model of what is in and around the Albany area. They were also on the GN line, but I think they went forward into the 70’s with some BN stuff, and also some NP. If you can get over there and see what they have, you might get some ideas. I don’t know how often they meet. Here are a couple pictures I took there a couple of years ago.

I hope you can find out what is being planned at your next meeting. If you don’t all have the same goals, it will be pretty hard to have any kind of a club comraderie. That would be a shame. You should definitely ask your questions, even if you don’t get the answers you want, at least everyone should be able to sort out what they want to get done.

FT