It's Fall, time to clean the layout's tracks and start operating.
The next meeting for Division 9 will be held on September 23, 2023, at the Kalamazoo Bridge Club, 648 Maple Hill Drive. This is just East of U.S. 131 and South of West Main. The enterence is around the back side. This will be the annual meeting for the election of officers. Check out this month's YardMaster for all the details.
June Meeting Recap
From 10am to noon time, 10 people participated the Division 9 layout visit to Maynard Mitchell's HO model railroad layout. Maynard has a great layout and is an incredible scratchbuilder. Maynard models the CNW in northern Wisconsin and Interchanges with other railroads that operated in the area. Maynard's layout is nice size layout in his basement. There is staging yard in a separate room, that attaches through a tunnel connections on to the layout in two places. The layout room is divided in two parts and has operating tracks and towns on both sides of the rooms. There is a "duck under" piece that is installed during operations in the one doorway.
Touring the layout is three fold event. First is the opportunity to see Maynard's modeling skills on the layout and his scatchbuilding skills on buildings and other things. The second is enjoy his scenery building and scenes that the track runs through. The third part is two listen to Maynard explain how he built and put together everything on the layout. So not only did we get to spend two hours looking, we also got a two hour "learning clinic". Incredible information and just a pleasure to see the outcomes. Lots of photos were taken by everyone so they could take home lots of ideas for the own layouts.
Afterward, four of us went to lunch together at the Firehub Restaurant in Battle Creek, west of downtown, which is along the CN main line tracks. Besides great conversations, and great pizza, the CN ran east bound and west bound freight trains pass us on a beautiful weather day.
