I attended my 1st Op's seesion !

I attended the LDSIG/OpSIG/NMRA PCR joint regional meeting in Santa Clara, CA during the weekend of January 24-25, 2009. http://homepage.mac.com/jacobsen/LORM2009/

Side Note:
Although I just joined, he OPSIG is a great organization worthy of joining. The best part is that they offer a $5.00 online membership that offers full membership - you just have to download the news letter – that’s the cost of one magazine for a whole year of membership. Most of the other groups I belong to have long since stopped the expensive process of printing and mailing newsletters and I like lower fees needed to belong. I wish the LDSIG could the same.

Back to trains-
The first day there were several good presentations and was I was fortunate enough to have my track and Op’s plan reviewed by 2 well respected experts as part of the get together! Our gracious host for the event was the South Bay Historical Railroad Society http://www.sbhrs.org/ . The club layout was open to the public at the same time and was running for all to see.

The second day was for Op sessions. There was a list of very impressive private and club layouts that opened their doors for guests to operate. There were many styles, era’s, locals and methods of operations available.

I was happy to get my 1st choice of one of the nicest clubs layouts I’ve seen - Silicon Valley Lines http://www.siliconvalleylines.com/home.html

It’s 23’ x 72’ double deck layout that has over 600’ of main line. They operate diesels with some hold over transition steam. They use NCE DCC, Train Block Control (I think I have that right) and a home grown version of Ship It for train orders. It was an amazing day that flew by - 6 hours went by in the blink of an eye! The club even ordered pizza for all.

I was able to run 4 trains that day. My first was a though train that went for longest “half” of the layout, the second ran the other half of the layout with some switching, the third was a switching train that ran the longer half and I ran my last train by myself - the PFE Express (although it had a little switching) that ran from one end to the other. It was everything I was looking for and exposed me to many aspects of an Op’s session that I wanted to experience. The guys at the club were just as remarkable as their layout - very friendly, helpful and just all around fun to run trains with. If I was to join a club this would be the one.

Some things that I need to look at more as a result of this OP’s session are generating train orders and Train Block Control – if I got that right.