Category: Mt Vernon Clinic

Click here to read the Mt. Vernon Non-Clinic Report for March 2020 .

Click here to read the Mt. Vernon Clinic Report for February 2020.

By Ted Becker

The Mount Vernon Clinic is changing its meeting night to the third Monday of the month beginning in October 2019 and will continue on the third Monday after that. The next meeting will be October 21. The clinic is still located at the Mount Vernon Senior Center and the meeting starts at 7:00. This change moves us away from being back-to-back with our sister clinic in Oak Harbor and opens participation to folks with Thursday conflicts.

Also our meeting room will be in the craft room where we were last season.
The previously announced change to the larger meeting room did not work out.

To kick off our meeting on the new date will be a clinic on decals by Nick
Muff and Al Carter which is shaping up to be a very informative presentation.

Ted Becker

By Dale Bearden & Karl Kleeman

Nick Muff’s “More Than” An HO Layout

May’s meeting was hosted by Nick Muff at his residence. We were privileged to visit Nick’s incredible” train room” and his Kansas City Southern HO layout. First, the “MORE THAN.” Nick has a full size F3 cab front end in his train room. It has the cab interior with all the original equipment. And if that is not enough, he has recreated part of a passenger car. The car was recreated but has an all-original interior. And he has the furnishings and accessories of the proper era.

Now we know that most of you have seen Nick’s train room more than once but perhaps all of you do not know the whole story. When Karl and I arrived at Nicks, we met Jim Betz, a new member of our group, and just like myself, this was his first visit to the layout. I’m sure I wasn’t the first who wanted to hear Nick explain the story of how he came to have a complete F3 cab in his basement. He set out to buy a locomotive throttle tower quadrant and possibly a brake quadrant to display. Nick learned they were scrapping locomotives at a Seattle salvage yard. He went down just looking for the throttle and brake units and was told by the owner’s son that an F3 was waiting to be scrapped. As I recall Nick’s story, Nick and the scrap yard worker set about recovering the throttle and brake units for Nick. Nick inquired about what would happen to the locomotive, and learned that it would be scrapped, so he asked about purchasing a portion of the cab. The yardman said, why don’t you just take the whole cab? Nick was hesitant so he made a deal for most of the cab, minus the nose. On the way, home his wife asked what would become of the nose. Nick replied, probably just make Toyota parts out of it. They looked at each other, decided that they really didn’t want that to happen so they turned around, and went back and made arrangements to purchase the full cab and it’s interior equipment. In order to transport the Cab economically, Nick had it cut into 3 pieces, and brought it home on a U- Haul trailer.

I asked Nick, how he got it into the basement. He said he had a slab poured and he had a friend with a crane so they lowered it onto the slab. We learned the full story of how it was reassembled, welded and painted. The question was asked what would happen to it when they move? Nick commented that one wall of the basement was specially built such that it was not a supporting wall and could be removed so that the full cab could be removed. A project like this would be intimidating for most of us. But you get the feeling nothing intimidates Nick.