September 16 - 17, 2000

It’s fall. Football is in the air and Semper Gumby is in the winds. With our Superintendent suddenly out of town on business, I stepped in to coordinate the layout at the Greenburg Upper Marlboro show. Fortunately, with the Redskins playing the Cowboys on Monday night, we didn’t to worry about traffic.

Edd Braithwood, Paul Diley, John Cook, Leonard White, Jeff Peck, and Greg Nagy responded to a call for modules, with augmentation from the corners and Grigg’s Crossing from the trailer, along with my OLI Tower. The trailer was prepositioned on Friday night, but the notes and layout diagram left inside did no good since none of the early arrivals had a key to the trailer. Since Keith had arranged for our normal “skybox” accommodations in the Show Place Arena, everyone knew where to go and we weren’t really delayed by the trailer key problem. With Matt Schaffer, Mitch Brown, Jay Keese and Bill Baldwin on hand to help with set-up, and John Drye around to kibbutz, we were up and running with plenty of time before the show opening. Ken Allen and Dave Greenacre arrived later to help keep trains running and assist with the clinic Saturday. Sunday brought help from a different crew, with George Brown, Bill Reaves, Noll Horan, and several guests to help run trains and tear down.

We tried a couple of new things with this layout. We deployed an anti-Lionel-smoke device (a fan) on Sunday, because the Trackers now have a burning building generating smoke, in addition to their many engines. We had the 45-degree corner pair, manufactured for the club by Dave and Charles Greenacre, in the large trailer. We split the 2 halves and placed John Cook’s modules between them, giving us a different look - the layout was actually parallel to three of the walls in the skybox! It made it a little difficult to close the loop. The 45-degree triangle formed by the split corners meant that the distance between them was a multiple of the square root of 2. (Ask a geometry student.) But, with a couple of bridges and a little scrunch, we made up the couple of inches needed.

We also tried out one of the new Aristo2000s once we got the layout running. It appears moving between blocks will be real easy - there is a button for the frequency and another 2 buttons for the channel (one cycles up, the other down.) But, you have to press and hold buttons, which we didn’t do in the past. You now have to set a momentum and a stop time setting. Aristo added the latter setting so that trains stopped before they changed directions. And, the green light on the base unit doesn’t always blink when you press a button on the transmitter. There may be a few more tricks that our crack electronics crew will discover as we use the Aristo2000s more. But, if you are one of the many members who bought one of these, read ALL the directions for each step, because programming is different than the old Aristos.

Our clinics were well attended, as always. Saturday, we used Dave Greenacre’s Mirror Lake POFF to show module construction along with a track repair clinic (unballast, soldering, laying new track and ballasting). Sunday, the victims were the oNeTRAK/Mountain Line bridge set. Both days had audience participation sessions - and attendees leaving to go visit vendors on the floor afterwards.

Everyone had a great time running trains and working on various projects. Don’t forget that shows can be an even better opportunity than Backshops to work on modules. You’ve got more time and can go buy something that you discover you need. The Show Place Arena skybox is a great place for a large, single loop layout. Our 26 x 20 layout still had more than 1/3 of the room untouched and available for expansion. We won’t return to Upper Marlboro until winter - when the weather will probably bring out a larger crowd. We just have to remember to bring out a fan.