TCA Train Meet

["Ira Schneider" <ira_schneider@iname.com>]

Hi,

The TCA Train Meet in New Braunfels has come and gone.

We had a large layout, similar to the layout we had at the World's Greatest Hobby
on Tour show in January.  We had most of the layout, including Scott's scenery
modules, sky boards, and Plexiglas, set up on Friday evening.  On Saturday, we
ran trains around all tracks to verify the integrity of the layout and completed
setting up the scenery.

The club now owns a Lionel Legacy Command Set and one extra CAB-2 handheld
controller, which we used at the show.  We also have a range extender and a
PowerMaster Bridge (which we didn't use).  On Friday, I had unplugged the power
pack for the range extender so we could charge the batteries in the CAB-2's over night
and we forgot to reconnect the power pack in the morning.  I didn't notice this until
around lunch time.  In spite of this, we were able to control our trains from anywhere
within the New Braunfels Civic Center, so range doesn't seem to be a problem.  We
also appeared to have CAB-1 control from anywhere within the building.  The power
monitor is working again (the power supply burned out at the end of the last show).
(I didn't connect the PowerMaster Bridge because Lionel says you can connect either
the PowerMaster Bridge or a TMCC Command Base to the Legacy Command Base,
but not both at the same time.  Since we only had two CAB-2 controllers, we needed
the TMCC Command Base to support our CAB-1 controllers.)

We had lots of members, and lots of trains running all day.  There were many old
favorite trains, and some new ones.

This show was aimed at the O-gauge model railroading community, so there were
lots of vendors selling O-gauge equipment, many at reasonable prices.

I will create a photo album (probably during the week) and post it when I am finished.
Mike took some videos with his video camera mounted on a train, so you can see
an "engineer's eye view" of the layout, similar to what you see on my wireless
train camera but with much better quality.

Around 3:00 PM we started having strange problems with the layout.  The transformer
for track 4 was apparently shutting down with any load applied.  We appeared to be
having interference on the TMCC controller, even though the only other layout at the
show which was using TMCC was using tracks 5-8.  It appeared that there was some
kind of short between tracks 2 and 4 because whenever we applied power to track
2 the voltage on track 4 followed along.  (I even disconnected the output from
the track 4 Track Power Controller and saw the same effect.)  Since it was late in
the afternoon and most of the vendors were packing up we just called it quits.  Hopefully
the problems won't show up again.  If they do, we will deal with them at that time.

In summary, we had a great time at this event.



Ira