What A Club Has Taught Me

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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So, after about 67 hours of accumulated time, I have picked up quite a few things.

1. I found the community I desired

I’m was in an odd spot. I have a very niche hobby, so very few people I know shared a common interest with me. The club I joined is everything I ever wanted. A lot of the guys over there specialize in a certain field (DCC, Operations, Wiring, Scenery), so if I ever need someone to talk to about a certain issue I have, they have someone that could help me. And, a few of the guys come from the East Coast and Midwest, so they add to the many West Coast railroads already on the layout.

2. I discovered I like kit building

Well, I finally stopped dragging my feet. One of the newbie workshops was slapping together a Proto 2000 50’ boxcar kit. I loved it. While it was mildly annoying breaking the stirrups and grab irons, everything else was pretty amusing. I have a couple more kits I need to put together, still, so I have some more work to do.

3. I have a place to run my equipment

My house has no room for a layout, so I never bothered buying track. Why should I when I have nowhere to put it? The club has one of the largest layouts in the Western Hemisphere, with many long straights and heavy grades, I have been told that if they run smoothly there; they’d be fine everywhere else. Of course, I buy a ton of Kadee 148’s, but if it makes my stuff run well, it’s an expense I have to make.

4. I need to back off my ambitions

I think I spent a little too long on the pontential projects rather than the realistic ones. Some of the members brought me down to Earth. Instead of trying to prepare for superdetailing my Athearn Genesis F3 and Walthers sleeper, I shelved those ideas and started focusing on what I really need to know; operations of the prototypes.

Will my projects ever happen? Sure, but not with

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Honestly, I am happy for you and I don’t mean to dump on your thread. But this has bothered me for some time.

I went to a MR club, hoping to learn about DCC. It was a DC club, as I was told in no uncertain terms. A handful of guys, all very friendly, were talking about local railroading.

Two guys, both young, no more than in their 20’s, were running their trains, swapping in phono plugs to activate the next block. Their engines got stuck in a tunnel, dirty track I think, as there seemed to be no other explanation offered.

I thought I might see what a real operating session was like, or learn about DCC. There was nothing there. I did not go back for a second time.

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Jet clipper, what’s the name of your club if you don’t mind me asking.

Also clubs aren’t for everyone and every club is different, a special way of doing things, sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s not.

I am a member of two clubs one is the roundy roundy type which is cool, the other is a prototypical operating club with a large layout. Both have pros and cons. Thing to remember is when joining a club is you’re the rookie newbie and not to make waves. No club is perfect, there will be that ONE guy that is just a horses patoot, and therell be that ONE recurring issue that makes operations grind to a halt. Have patience.

Eventually I’d like to start my own club that models heavy mountain railroading with a variable time period from 20s to the 80s, mainly the 40s-60s though, that way it allows the members some freedom. Also it’ll model at least two divisions for operations. Of course I’ll have to wait a little while till I have more connections in the modeling community.

Good luck!

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That sounds ambitious.

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I was there for the founding meeting of Scale Rails of Southwest Florida about 35 years ago. It took 25 years before the club had a permanent home and built a beautiful double decked operational layout.

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-Kevin

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I live in rural Arkansas and I wish I had a club close enough to join. I know it would be a mixed bag of people but so is life. Just like eating fried chicken - enjoy the meat and spit out the bones.

I doubt I would participate as a routine member since I have my own good size layout. However, I would love to discuss many aspects of layout construction and operations that I am clueless on.

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I’ve been a member of my club for 25 years, and was a youth member 3 years before that. I have learned much from my membership and made life-long friends because of it. I’m glad someone else is enjoying the club experience, because most dicussions online are anti-club (to say the least).

Where else can one get the opportunity to design and build a 6300+ sq. ft. layout? Or get cab rides and throttle time on real locos? Or tour rail facilities and Trains hot spots with a group of friends? Being in a club doesn’t have to be just model trains; you make friends with wide variety of people you would otherwise never meet. At my club, we’ve got: train engineer, conductor, fire dept. captain, insurance agent, ambulance EMT, electrical engineer, architect, hobby shop owner, computer programmer, IT manager, electrician, cabinet maker, carpenter, contractor, retailer, mechanic, civil engineer, accountant, house painter, and so on.

Heck, today is my club’s annual pool party. It starts at 2PM and lasts 'til 10PM.

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I was fortunate to find an informal operations round-robin group a few years ago with several layouts in different scales within a short driving distance of my home. It turned out that a lot of these same people also belong to the Los Angeles Model Railroading Society (LAMRS) and I have repeatedly been invited to participate in the frequent LAMRS operating sessions. Virtually everyone I have met through these groups have been great people who not only share my love of model railroading but often other interests as well (music for one). I wish I could join LAMRS but they meet on Tuesday nights and my Tuesday nights have been booked solid for over 30 years by one of the band’s I play in. Our round-robin group could probably use a name as well. I do enjoy picking the brains of the various members for ideas and techniques to try on my own layout. I also enjoy being able to help out when I have an idea, skill or technique to offer. I have been trying to ready my own layout for operations but still have some timetable kinks to straighten out.

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I was a member of a club in SW. fl for 10yrs or so loved it. Made friends and learned how to do all aspects of the hobby. FA-1

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belonged to two clubs over the years , most of the time i’ve been a lone wolf modeler as lived in remote areas. but will say the two i’ve belonged to left me with a bad taste , the first one started ok then some non modelers joined and it became a political club . the second was ok for a while then they started making all kinds of rules as to what one could run , what brand of kits were ok to use on layout, ect. ect.

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The Pasadena Model Railroad Club out near Los Angeles.

If you’d like to see the layout itself, there are a few pictures here.

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Huh, funny you mention the LAMRS, because that would have been my second choice if I didn’t like my current club.

Maybe I’ll drop by?

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Woo, this thread got a few replies, so I’m pretty happy for that!

Let me clear up something I stated initially:

I have a tendency of being cryptic and forgetting what I want to say while I am typing.

I do have a few things to mildly stress over regarding the club.

DCC

The club I’m with used to run with a complex DC system (supposedly the most complex of it’s type) until about 2015, when they almost completely gutted the original wiring in favor of a Digitrax system. While a good 95% of the conversion is complete, there still are a few issues we need to work out still. A major issue is one of the yards having a dead spot, and as such; trains tend to die leaving or entering, requiring the yardmaster to physically pull the trains to a section of powered track. Is this a huge problem that ruins the experience? No, but we do want to get it completed for…

The Open House

The big public relations event happening in November. I like to call this my ‘trial by fire’. Here, the club is open for all to see. The lighting gets changed, everyone has their job to do, and we (the operators) get to running the stars of the show; our trains. With the general public showing up to this, we gotta make the club look good to attract more potetial members, so a lot of our problems should be solved by then.

(Not really a club problem) My Problem

I really want something of my own to run, really just for pride. This isn’t too much of a pressing issue, so I can drag my feet with it until about October, but even that may be pushing it.

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Clubs are a wonderful thing to have. I have been in three of them through the years. I started out going to the Stillwater Model Railroad club in Stillwater OK when I was about 13. They taught me a lot about the hobby. I was with them through two layouts. The first one was upstairs in a downtown building and controlled with CTC16. They lost that building and moved to one by the fairgrounds and built a nice layout. I often wonder how many hundreds of pounds of plaster we slung on the floor to ceiling mountains. They went through a couple of building losses and I wonder where they are now. When we moved to Indiana there was no club in New Castle. We were there several years and ironicly a modular club got formed several months before we moved but I was in it for that time. Today we live in Danville VA and have a great club here with a huge layout. We just had a young man about the age I was when I started join. It has been fun to try and help him out. I have been a couple of places where there was a club but did not join- mainly due to time constraints.

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Club 1: Tiny membership, more or less free premises. “We’ve always done it this way and we have to be running for the November show.”

Club 2: No coherent plan, but the railroad fit in the space available. Five guys did fine work and the other 20 sat and BS’d. And ate all the cookies.

Club 3: “We’re building a railroad to run from X to Y in this particular part of this US state and we dispatch the line-up using track warrants.”

I’m having a lot of fun with Club 3 and have met some really smart people. Same in Club 2, as far as people. They really get you to stretch your skills and learn new things.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that if I want to have all my railroad, all my way, it will have to be at my home.

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I’ve been a member of the Santa Susana Pacific Historical Society in Simi Valley (about 30 miles due northwest of downtown L.A.) for about 10 years. I joined in order to get reaquainted with the hobby and learn about DCC, creating scenery, learn operations and bascially get up to speed after about a 40 year hiatus. I made a lot of progress on my original goals, met some great folks along the way both at he club and in the hobby. I held several offices in the club during my membership Became actively involved with the NMRA Division and gained a wealth of knowledge.

I retired last year and have since moved to Northern California and plan to build my own layout. I’m not sure if I’ll become a member of one of the clubs in the area but I do plan on actively particpating in some of the round robins in the area.

My advice for club membership is to try it on for size and fit before making a commitment. The Santa Susana Club had a 6 month Probationary Member status to give both members and perspective members to meet and become acquainted before a vote was made to accept them as a new member. Ask for a copy of the club’s bylawas and observe how they are followed. Club membership is not the right fit for everyone but in my case it was.

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I had been a member of a model railroading club in my student days and that has taught me never to join any club in my life again. Club life with all the bye-laws, formal things and the necessity to appoint officers, just isn´t my thing.

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I can kind of understand that. We have a business meeting every month. Basicly we just do the financials and give progress reports on the layout. Not a lot of major business. However we have to have one as we are sponsered by Parks and Rec and that is required. Ours go pretty easy- I only remember a couple of no votes. Saw one club elsewhere that I visited where they were having a real fuss over where to have the Christmas dinner. [banghead] Some clubs are more formal some are less formal. It may be the one you tried has changed too.

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At different points in its 35 year history, Scale Rails of Southwest Florida has fallen into all of those categories.

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-Kevin

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I think club quality and appeal changes from place to place. In Utah we don’t have to many clubs. Only one of them has a building to call home and house a full time layout. The rest are either modular clubs that only get together for shows or auctions, or clubs that are trying to find a new place to settle down. There is a live steam club building a track in a public park, but I don’t have the cash or time to start live steam right now. I really don’t have an interest in joining any of the clubs here at this moment.

My most fun though socially has been through a bit of an ‘informal club’ i.e. the operators group at a local private layout. That has been pretty fun, and I enjoy getting out there when I can and the style of operations with CTC and waybills, etc. interests me far more than any other local club layouts. My friends and I have actually bounced around the idea of just formally starting our own group; maybe a Free-Mo style modular club based on one specific prototype or something… but none of us really have the time to sit down yet and make that a reality.

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Yeah, that’s what every club needs: ANOTHER person hanging out and jakkin’ but not doing much work (“I doubt I would participate as a routine member…”).

Ed