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About this blog

In an attempt to help Fareham Club members stave off cabin fever, this blog tells the story of my time living in the USA and operating a typical American basement layout.

Entries in this blog

Episode 8 – Postscript: A bit about the Club scene in the USA plus “The DCC Conversion”

In what is most definitely the last episode of this story I’m going to talk about what happened in my last 4 months working in the US, but first a quick recap of the modelling scene in the US.   Firstly, remember, there are virtually no clubs as we would recognise them, at least around Washington DC.  OK, I did eventually find one near where we lived, it was based in the Station House at Vienna, Virginia; they had built a multilevel layout in H0 inside the building; they held open hous
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Episode 7 – Looking to the future

Anyone who has had to work with me closely in any capacity will know that I tend towards having bright ideas, tossing the hand grenade into the conversation and then sitting back and watching things develop.  Indeed, at one point when I was working for the US Navy I went into the office one morning and said to my team “I had a really neat idea on the train on the way in” – and they all scarpered, every single one of them.  Oh well!   INCOMMING!   Now, I must prefix this post
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Episode 6 – Could we make something like the CORy work in the Club?

Of the things I did while living in the US, I look back with much fondness at those operating evenings at Peter’s and if I could find a way of replicating them here in the UK then I would, but what would be needed to enable this?  In what I am planning to be the penultimate post in this blog – at least for the time being – my intention is to share some ideas about something I have often wanted to try at the Club but never had the courage to make a start on, as much because of the complexity of m
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Episode 5 – Translating CORy operation to an English setting

Having just walked through a typical operating session of the CORy I thought it might be worth translating that story into something a little closer to home so that it might make a bit more sense to those more used to an English setting than to an American one.  I’ve chosen as my model the Meon Valley Railway in the 1950s as it is the stuff of legend in the Club and we can all relate to the places I’m going to describe; and for good measure I’m going to describe the real railway rather than the
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Right Away Driver!

In the last episode I described what had to be done to prepare for an operating session.  I’ve got my controller, I’ve got my car cards and waybills, and we’re off.  Well, if you’re wise – not quite.   The first and probably the most important thing any wise operator should do is to quickly thumb through the cards and work out what we’ve got to do, do the cards match the cars in our train?  Are all the waybills for stations and industries we are going to call at?  If not why not?  Whic
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Episode 3 - Let's get ready to drive some trains

So we arrive at the real purpose of this series of articles, what was an operating session like?   Well, on the CORy sessions took place on a Friday evening after work was over for the week.  Most of the other operators were Government employees of one sort or another and The Federal Government would shut down at 4 on Friday afternoon  which meant that by the time you had got home, changed and eaten you could be back in Alexandria at around 7 – and that was “sign-on” time. We woul
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Episode 2 - American houses and an introduction to the CORy

Having set the scene in the last entry, let me introduce you to American houses, layouts, and Peter's railway.   When I first got started in the model railroading hobby in the USA I found that, unlike the clubs I was used to in the UK, the "standard" seemed to be for an individual with a large basement to effectively start his own club.  Having just been through the home-search process we were very aware of the differences between UK and US homes; briefly for the uninitiated: almost ev
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In the beginning...

This blog is a part of an effort the Fareham MRC are making to prevent our members getting cabin fever during our enforced isolation from our hobby.  That said, anyone else interested in a different way of operating a model railway is more than welcome to browse it and comment.  This first post is going to be a bit short and will not convey much useful information, I'm using it to give our members who are not regular RM Web users a chance to catch up and find a way to access it before I launch i
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