Category: News

Al Lowe

At the national convention in Milwaukee this past summer, the NMRA created a new position, Vice President of Special Projects. Bill Kaufman, a well-known modeler in the San Francisco Bay area, is the first holder of this position.

In a recent interview with The Model Railway Show, Bill spoke to co-host Trevor Marshall about his plans to use this position to strengthen the ties between the national organization and its Divisions and Regions, including the creation of a “best-practices” manual. It’s well worth a listen.

The Model Railway Show is a free Internet-based newsmagazine show about our hobby, delivered twice monthly as a podcast on iTunes or by direct download. Each show includes two interviews on a broad range of topics and runs about 20 minutes. Bill’s interview appears in Episode 2, which is now available. For more information, including how to listen, click The Model Railway Show.

Al Lowe

Here’s what’s been going on at HQ recently:

• Headquarters just completed an analysis of our RailPass Program to see how many RailPass members went on to become full NMRA members. The statistics show that, since January 1, 2009, a whopping 65% have “re-upped!” That’s just about 2 out of every 3 RailPass members who’ve stayed with us. From the time the RailPass program started in 2005, about 48% have renewed … again a great statistic.

  A lot of the credit for that retention goes to everyone in our Regions and Divisions. You’re making new members feel welcome, and you’re showing them the benefits of NMRA membership. So … THANKS!

• Huge progress is being made with Diamond Club scanning. Craig Sutherland, the man in charge of the project, reports that they have about 500 sets of diesel loco plans (average size: 24″x30″). In addition, he and Stephen Priest brought about 50 boxes of photographs (with about 700 photos each) back to Historical Archives Services (the company doing the scanning) from our Kalmbach Memorial Library. They mentioned that there are a lot of black and white steam loco shots, some early diesel shots, and a lot of photos that caused these seasoned pros to say “wow.” Stephen called the collection “an unknown treasure.”

  We’re finding out that our archives are even more vast than we thought! So if you or your members haven’t made a donation yet, please do so so we can get these railroad treasures on the web … and eventually into your hands.

• The Winter Board Meeting is being held concurrently with the Budget and Operations meetings this year in Las Vegas at the Palace Station Hotel (about 5 miles from the airport). The Budget and Operations meetings, which are by invitation only, begin on Tuesday, February 22 at 9 a.m. The Board Meeting runs from 9 to 5 (or later) on Wednesday, February 23, and 9 to 5 (or later) on Thursday, February 24. All NMRA members are welcome to attend.
• As you probably read in the October of NMRA Magazine, the X2011 West NMRA Convention committee is making extensive use of social media to promote their Sacramento convention. Over the next several months they’ll be posting detailed information about layout and prototype tours, clinics, sights to see, and other pertinent facts. If you haven’t visited them on Facebook or signed up to follow them on Twitter, this is the perfect time to get your feet wet and see what the “social media” buzz is all about! Both Facebook and Twitter are free.

Gerry Leone MMR, NMRA Communications Director

Railroading experts at HAS begin the daunting task of scan-ning the Kalmbach Library’s massive collection of photographs, drawings, slides, and plans. The first photos should be available online in early 2011.

If you’re a subscriber to NMRA Magazine (formerly Scale Rails) you’ve seen the “Timeframes” series of photographs printed on the magazine’s last page. Those are all shots taken from the Kalmbach Memorial Library (KML) archives. The fact is, our NMRA Library has over 100,000 images, negatives, slides, plans and drawings, and only a handful have ever been seen by NMRA members because it would have entailed making a personal trip to Headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to flip through the files.

Soon that will all change, thanks to the NMRA’s Diamond Club. The Diamond Club is a fundraiser specifically designed to support adding enhanced content to our website at www.nmra.org. The first item on the list of is scanning those 100,000 images and making them available for download.

Each of the 100,000 photos in the Kalmbach Library must be digitized, and important metadata added to each scan to aid in fast, efficient user searches. It’s a time consuming process that will be an invaluable resource to members.

The good news is that scanning of the photographs has begun! In August of 2010, Historical Archives Services (HAS), the firm the NMRA Board of Directors hired to do the scans and design the photo website, began receiving and catalog-ing shipments of photographs from KML. HAS estimates that the first batch of photographs will be available for viewing online sometime in the first quarter of 2011, after a short period of beta testing late this year.

Putting the entire library online will be a costly, time consuming task, since each photo’s listing will also contain highly detailed, searchable metadata, which is be-ing added by the railroad experts at HAS. This detailed metadata will make it easier and faster for users to find exactly the photograph they’re looking for. Cur-rent plans are to make the low-resolution thumbnails of the photographs avail-able to everyone via the website around the clock. Users will be able to download high-resolution files, and NMRA members will receive a substantial discount. Proceeds from the scans will help fund the remainder of the project and future Diamond Club web projects.

As promising as this sounds, it’s important to remember that the Diamond Club still hasn’t reached its projected goal of $75,000. If you haven’t contributed to this worthy cause, please send your donation now to The Diamond Club, NMRA, 4121 Cromwell Road, Chattanooga, TN 376421, or do it online at www.nmra.org/diamondclub.

NMRA

Welcome to the new NMRA logo and, in many ways, the new NMRA. On its face this wheel-on-rail symbol represents the oldest of the NMRA’s objectives: interoperability. Yet, it also represents the future. It’s a symbol of our willingness to keep pace with the changes all around us. Changes in our world, in our lives, in our hobby. While it honors the achievements of the past 75 years, it commits us to the continuation of those achievements in the next 75.

Most important, our new logo is a symbol of the NMRA’s commitment to you. As your wants and needs evolve, so will we, with expanded content on our website, easier accessibility to the information in our Library and programs designed to position us well for another seven-and-a-half decades.

NMRA now replaces National Model Railroad Association and becomes our brand, just as NFL, AARP, and CBS have become brands in their respective fields. We’ve even renamed our magazine NMRA Magazine to further reinforce that brand. And our website, www.nmra.org, will become your “portal to more fun in scale model railroading.”

So as we move into tomorrow, think of our new NMRA logo as a symbol of our promise to you – and our promises to each other – that we’ll all keep the hobby of scale model railroading alive, vibrant … and ready for the future.