Perhaps everyone could submit their
recollections on the event. Then Ed could mush 'em all together into an
article? Just a thought...
I'll start off:
We had a good turnout for setup.
Thanks to all who came. Ron, Adrian, Ira, Scott, Bob, Monk and I did
setup. Stevo was Fat Controller for setup. We had a few kinks in the
finished layout:
we accidentally hooked the s-curve up wrong
which caused the power for tracks 3 and 4 to be coupled! We discover
this friday night and fixed it. It was fairly easy to seperate the S and
reconnect it in the proper alignment. The two remaining bugs were not
discover until Saturday morning.
I accidentally had a 2nd TMCC command base
hooked to my sidings. This cause dual TMCC signals to be put onto the
rails. The engines didn't like 'em much! Simply turning off my unit
solved this problem.
we had a short in a jones plug that caused
the power for tracks 1 and 2 to cross. We found this one by powering
up track 1 and watching the voltage on track 2 (which was getting juice
from track 1 due to the short), and unplugging/replugging
the jones plugs at each module until we saw the voltage fall on track 2.
Turns out there was a broken jones plug that had a loose track 2 wire that was
touching the track 1 pin!!! Scott took this module home to fix it.
After these three bugs were worked out, the
layout ran pretty good!!! For future reference, both DCS and TMCC engines
should be run on all tracks after setup to find these bugs. Also, ensure
that there are no voltage crossovers should be done too. I blame the Fat
Controller. :-)
The crowd seemed to enjoy watching siding
manuvers. I certainly had fun doing them! At one point, I had
boxed my caboose in and needed help from one of the spectators on how to get it
back out at the end of the train. It was fun! Adrian's transfer
table worked great in both conventional and command mode. Conventional is
tricky, but once you understood what to do, it worked great. One problem,
though, is a conventional engine starts out in forward...than can be
tricky!
We had 2 wrecks which made for
excitement: ed accidently shot a coal car with his engine onto my
siding module. If it wasn't for some plexiglass adrian bolted to the end
of the siding, ed would be out one coal car and an engine! Scott had a
runaway that cause a nice crash too. I think both trains escaped
without any injuries. Perhaps we need a special page on our web site with
"crashes of the tinplate trackers" pics???
The air conditioning, again, was
marginal. We should really push ASTA next year to ensure that there is
adequate AC...
Teardown went smoothly, although everyone
was hot and tired. Ed, Rick, Ricky, Monk, Ryan, Adrian, Scott, and I all
helped tear down.
I think we made some good $$ on the
Raffle. Thanx to Lorraine for working the raffle table!
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