February 2, 2026
Since the first of the year we have held three operating sessions. The February 1st session was the first
one where we experienced severe issues from going to the heating season from the cooling season.
We've had this problem before, where there has been enough heating in the weeks prior to a session that the moisture in the
layout's wooden framework has evaporated. Since the wood shrinks and the metal rails don't,
at at least one point on each leg of the layout, we see the rail buckle in places. This causes serious operational problems!
The most dramatic bit of buckling we experienced during this session was on a bridge track just east of the Wilson meat
packing plant outside of Logansport. We also had the cuved stock rail of the diverging (curved) route of a couple
of turnouts shove in towards the point rails in a few places, creating a few tight flangeways. The way we have dealt with this sort of thing in the past
is to place a few pans of water in front of fans on the floor during the heating season. We will do that at the next Wednesday night work session.
We've seen this happen on a few other layouts in the northern climes and most layout owners in this situation do the same thing.
We addressed the bridge track by cutting its rails a little shorter during the session, since it was on the mainline and would inconvenience everybody.
January 3, 2026
The last few years have been interesting. The layout is now officially
known as "The Second District of the Montpelier Division of the
Wabash Railroad" or as we call it, the "Wabash Second District".
We are no longer known as the "Operations Road Show" team, as effective
2:00pm Friday, July 18, 2025 we turned over the "Operations Road
Show" name to the N Scale Events
Group. This is the rather loose-knit group of N scalers who
provided the N scale layouts for us to hold Operations Road Show
sessions at the St. Louis NMRA National Convention in 2022, the
Grapevine, Texas Convention in 2023 and the Novi, Michigan Convention
in 2025. The primary movers and shakers of this group are known
best for their enormous biennial Free-MoN setups at Evanston, Wyoming.
We turned over our fast clocks, our fascia-mounted trainorder stations
and the laptop that controlled them.
We have lost two of our regular session members,
with the passing of Walt Trancygier in 2024 and Dennis Ludwig in
late summer 2025. Walt was always game to participate in our operating
sessions and to help with our setups and by joining up with us,
even he acknowledged that he was diving into the deep end of complicated
model railroading. Dennis offered his own years of expertise from
the Southern Michigan and the various Adrian and Blissfield lines.
Both men will be sorely missed.
In addition to that rather major change, over the past two years,
we have accomplished a number of things:
We
have converted from using the LogicRail Technologies LNFC Loconet
Fast Clocks we had been using to using analog clock faces spread around
the room and run at "fast" speed by a central controller.
We had no problem with the LogicRail fast clocks and they have served
us well over the 20+ years that we have used them. Analog clocks are
much more in keeping with our 1964-era, however. We purchased inexpensive
analog clocks and added our own blue LED as a PM indicator.