Greater Houston Train Show, February 18, 2017

We were once again invited to this one-day show. The main hall had a Z-, N-, HO-, and our S-scale layout setup. The G-gaugers were in another room in the same building. This show was quite special for us. John from the Austin area made the drive down to join us again (he was a new member last year). Then we also had Chuck and his sons join us for the first time. Also Dan joined us from the Hempstead area, and Jerry drove all the way down from the San Antonio/Austin area. Dan and Jerry are both Sn3 modelers. I think we had a record number of manpower on hand for set-up. This was a good thing, because we only had a little over two hours to set it all up.

In this photo, Howard is admiring the scenery built by Ria in the corner module. One of Chuck's sons brought his new Lionel American Flyer SD70ACe locomotive. Chuck runs hi-rail at home, but he swapped out the wheels with scale ones and they were able to run the locomotive on our layout just fine. Dan had brought some of his S-Helper Service reefers, which still had the AF-compatible claw couplers on them, so they fit the SD70ACe perfectly. Swapping out one coupler on one of the cars allowed that one car to be a conversion car, so that the rest of the train could be equipped with all scale couplers. With modern equipment it is easy to play in both worlds of "S", AF/hi-rail or "scale". The locomotive, equipped with TMCC, ran perfectly on our Digitrax DCC system, complete with sound and smoke.

Chuck, obscured by Bob's grain tower, and one of his sons to the left are on the outside of the layout, while Bob (dark-blue shirt) and Ron are on the inside of the layout.

Unfortunately for most of the day, the outside (passenger) main line of track was not cooperating. We were unable to run anything on the line, except Peter's battery-powered locomotive. Peter (on his knees in this photo), Bob, and Rusty (white shirt opposite of Bob outside of the layout) were working on trying to resolve the issue.

Where you find perfectly blue water, you are bound to find swimmers.

New member Dan took a break from running his engines on the layout, for lunch.

This year we decided to make a long and skinny set-up. We had the freight yard modules (18 feet total) and two additional 6-foot modules on one side, and the passenger yard modules and two 6-foot modules on the other side. In between the corner modules at each end we put a 4-foot module. This easily allowed us to run two full trains per main line.

Peter (left) and Rusty spent about 6 hours looking for the reason why the outside main line wasn't getting enough voltage to run the trains. There was no short in the line. However, there was a clear voltage drop in the module where they are standing. At one point in our many conversations, Bob mentioned that sometimes the Digitrax panels go bad. We have those spread out around the layout so that if the battery in the throttle gets low, we can still plug in our throttles to control the train. Peter removed the wires to the panel that is at that module, and sure enough, that fixed the power issue with the outside line. The line had worked fine just two months prior, so all we could think of was that the circuit board or parts have gone bad in that panel. We will need to replace that one. The above photos were taken later in the afternoon, so the crowds had died down a bit, but the overall turn-out was very good.