A Snowstorm-delayed Session Satisfies

A trainful of railfans arrived at Mr. Hamer's last Friday night, ready for a long-delayed session on the B & M. Mike was proud to show off his latest purchase...a Boston and Maine Rail Diesel Car equipped with interior lighting and sound. Mike purchased this commuter engine from local modeller Michel Boucher. The train was captured approaching the New England River Bridge after having exited Marshall Cut.

Here we see Mr. Hamer, making up a train at the duckunder entrance to the layout room. The yard at this location poses as both Lowell Junction (south) and Portland (north) depending on train movements.

Rob is Mike's crewmate and they seem to be really enjoying themselves outside the trainroom. Along with Mr. Hamer, he is blocking the traffic for train MP3, a hotshot manifest freight.

B&M Alco switcher #1170 is busy working the north siding in town in the shadows of the large Phillips Furniture Factory. The crew aboard this Black Beauty is kept busy throughout the evening spotting and lifting cars from local industries and setting out traffic for mainline trains.

Here's Jim in the layout room. While the image is dark from this perspective, Mike's layout was designed using the old museum trick known as the shadowbox technique.

This "going away" shot was taken by a local railfan out near the inbound end of Marshall Cut at Milepost 39. The FT AB pairing #4217 are seeing their last days along the B&M as they will be traded in for parts to produce the latest purchase of GP9's in the new Bluebird paint scheme. Today, the engines are hauling outbound B&M train MP3 originating in Mechanicville, NY and terminating in Portland, Maine.

Bob's all smiles! Who wouldn't be...when you're operating trains with the boys of the Friday Night Group.

Close up shot of milk car: The local crew has just placed this milk car on the milk track leading into Marshall Creamery...a busy facility in North Dover. Milk trains are found on the headend of passenger trains due to their quick requirements to get to market.

We spot Ron working the town switcher as he is standing near the Boundary Road location on Mike's layout. Boundary Road is located on the outskirts of the town of North Dover.

Joel is Ron's crewmate for the local switcher job in town. Judging by all that traffic on the sidings in North Dover, they will be kept rather busy today. Joel is perusing the scene in an attempt to spot a particular freightcar.

Later on in the session, Fred is at the controls and he's all smiles thinking that he's got the challenges of the task well in control.

Howard is caught studying some of Mike's latest handiwork with craftsman structures. Looks like Howard, a craftsman modeller himself, is suitably impressed.

Here are the lads watching excerpts from the feature length film The Secret Trains Of New York City which included scenes from ten local layouts.

There were also just a few calories consumed - but we were all very disciplined and watched our waistlines closely.

It was an evening worth waiting for.

A Friday night Teaser

A Friday Night Teaser

Before you get to see all the shots and thoughts, we need your input. Because our layouts are typically well lighted, often with 5K flourescents, we tend not to use flash taking pictures around the layout. That can be a problem with people not on the layout since the light falls where it's intended - on the layout - not in the surrounding area where all the photogenic participants are.

We then can have heavy shadows that make it difficult to see all those smiling faces. Even on the layout, since we don't set up extra lighting for these sessions, details can be lost. But ... we have Photoshop. We can colour correct, apply auto contrast and auto levels, and adjust the brightness/contrast settings. Even so, I personally find that fill flash is required to eliminate enough shadow to see the full gloriosity of those smiles.

The problem arises because different folks see different brightnesses, probably due to the differences in our monitors. I suspect it varies too between work and home for the same reason. So ... here are two sets of shots: a train full of happy railfanners and a happy host.

Let's have some feedback on preferences for the brighter or darker pics. Just click on the Comments link and say something.

Thanks all. Now comes the session (well, after Photoshopping them all). Jim

Finally, an operating session

Between sickness and winter snowstorms, we haven't managed a scheduled session since mid-December. John's all better now, though, and Mike will be hosting his re-scheduled session next week.


It's been so long since we had an 'official' session, I forgot about pictures until Mr. Mike got out his camera and started taking some. By that time, we were no longer around the Vancouver Island Logging layout, so Mike took a couple of us sitting around chatting and consuming calories.


Things weren't quite as smooth as usual, with the layout not having been operated for quite a while. Also, I've spent a fair bit of time under the layout working on the mid-level section and pushing around the wiring a bit too much. Even with a checkout a couple of days earlier, there were more glitches than I would like to have seen. Nevertheless lots of trains were run, people had fun and there were no serious problems. Here, the Shay is pushing a cut of coal empties past the tipple.


Mike took the first train north, John following with the train south from Nanaimo. Bob took on Ladysmith and called back "Aren't there supposed to be some cars at the wharf?". Well, Mike and John took care of that, dropping a number of loads for shipment off island. Next, Bob remembered that he also had to handle the log and coal cars in the Victoria Lumber yard. No more comments about nothing to do after that.


Mr Mueller took on the Chemainus log dump (now who would have guessed we'd find him there?) and the run down from the middle level, making the first official crossing of the new log bridge over the Chemainus river. It's only temporarily installed so that it can be removed for work on the riverbed.



Stanley took the log train to transfer the logs that Mike had brought down south to Chemainus.

You can see the preliminary layout of spline showing where the double switchback will be located on the way up to the Victoria lumber show. It will work its way up both sides of the mountain via two cuts so that operators around the layout will be able to follow at least some of the progress of the Shay as it pushes its empties up a 5 or 6 degree rise to the top.



After all our hard work, we relaxed and solved many of the (railroad) world's problems while we had some tea and calories (nicely baked by Pat) to work off over the weekend. Now, back to work on more scenery for the upcoming Bobber convention in April!