Grab Iron Posts

George Bogatiuk, Director of Sales and Support for Soundtraxx will be at the Northwest Railway Archives in Burien this Sunday evening for a special presentation and clinic on Soundtraxx decoders.

Bring all your questions about installations and programing decoders for your specific locomotives.

The meeting will start at 6:30 at the Archives located at:

425 SW 153^rd St

Burien, WA

For more information or questions, contact me at:

russseg@gmail.com

206 200 2211

There will be a Tacoma/Puyallup area Model Railroad tour on
Saturday and Sunday April 18 & 19, 2020, from 9:00am – 4:00pm.
There will be multiple layouts which will be open to Model Railroad fans. Some will be open Saturday only, others on Sunday only.

Maps to, and descriptions of, each of the layouts will be available starting at 8:00 am on the 18th, at Rob’s Trains and Hobbies. He will be opening his store early and will be offering a 10% discount to those requesting a tour map.

This is a great opportunity to see some excellent modeling in all stages of completion, and save on your hobby needs!

Rob’s Trains and Hobbies
5423 South Tacoma Way
Tacoma, WA 98409
253-472-7732

Article and Photos by Rich Thom

Twenty-three gathered at Summer Hill in Oak Harbor for February’s SV&W NMRA Clinic, welcomed by Clinic Chair Rich Blake.  After reviewing the calendar, Rich to everyone’s delight showed some photos of Al Frasch’s new N-scale layout that he’s nearly completed in his new home near Tucson, AZ.  Al, a former long-time member, newsletter editor, and tireless booster of our clinic as well as model railroad operations in the area, built his new layout in less than two years.  Not unexpected from this energetic modeler—good work, Al!

For Show-and-Tell, Alan Murray brought in his O-scale road overpass (Fig 1).     

This is a work-in-progress and Alan will describe the overpass construction in detail at our March meeting.  He brought it this evening to show the details of the bents and stringers that will (by next month!) be hidden by roadway decking.  The overpass has a home: it will feature in one town on Jon Bentz’s in progress On30 layout in Freeland, joining many other scratch structures already in place.  Your reporter visited Jon’s layout recently and it will be a welcome addition to our clinic area’s operations-focused layouts.  Beta-testing will start this Spring; no pressure, Jon! 

The main subject matter at the meeting was “The World’s Last Woodburners” presented by your Grab Iron reporter.  That’s a rather sweeping title, because woodburning steam locos were scattered around the world here and there, on preserved railroads, in museums and so forth, but only in a very few places did entire fleets of motive power in everyday, workaday use still burn wood.  Your reporter visited two such places in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.  The first was the Philippines.  

The Philippine woodburners were found on the island of Negros, one of the country’s 7,000-plus islands.  Here were the majority of the Philippines’ Sugar Centrals, 45 of which were founded by American companies, most between 1912 and 1927.  Victorias Milling Company (Fig 3) was the largest of them all, at its peak grinding over 16,000 tons of cane each day during the milling season.  All of the motive power—in this case 0-8-0’s—burned wood.  Combined, the sugar railroads had over 1,000 miles of track fanning out like a spider web from the coast into the cane fields, on several gauges.  Victorias had the most unusual: 600mm, which at 1 foot 11 and 5/8 inches was essentially 2 foot gauge—but not quite!

George Bogatiuk, in charge of Sales and Support for Soundtraxx will be at Eastside Trains In Kirkland on Thursday from 4p to close.

He will have a vendor table at the Monroe Show Saturday from 10a-5p and Sunday 10a-4p. He will be giving a clinic on Saturday morning at 10:45 “Introduction to Tsunami2 and setup.” Things the decoder can do for you and why you want it.

He will also give a clinic Sunday evening at 6:30 at the Pacific Northwest Railway Archives in Burien.  That address is:

425 SW 153rd St.

Burien, WA

Please email me if you are interested.  

Russ Segner

206 200 2211

russseg@gmail.com 

Alex Brikoff

This is the second call for announcing the Eastside Clinic’s Mini Clinic Event to be held this year in March.  The Mini Clinic event is a group of four short clinics, not more than about 15 minutes each in length, to be presented during the March 2020 Eastside Get Together Clinic.  Each of the Clinic topics were determined by popular vote.  After the votes were tabulated, there were the four most popular topics.  One of topics already has a clinician volunteer.  The remaining three listed below still need clinicians.  WE DESPERATELY NEED VOLUNTEER CLINICIANS TO PRESENT CLINICS FOR THESE THREE TOPICS:

• Servo switch machine installation
• Fine-tuning and maintaining locos
• Weathering rolling stock and/or engines

What I’m looking for is a fairly high level, short, summarizing clinic about 15 minutes in duration on each of these topics from the three clinicians.    

So, if you have any interest at all in presenting a clinic on any one of the above topics at the Eastside Mini Clinic Event in March, please let me know. Call (425) 466-1490 or email abrikoff@frontier.com. Thank you!

Lisa Murray

It’s that time of year – elections.  Every year, we elect some of our leadership by a vote of the general membership.  This year, the two positions open will be one Director and District Superintendent.  A nominating committee has been appointed chaired by Lisa Murray.  If you are interested or want to nominate someone, please contact Lisa Murray at 206 310 6778 or mattinata@outlook.com.

The responsibilities for the positions are outlined in this excerpt from the By-Laws

The position of Director to be voted upon is now held by Ed Ives and he has indicated he wants to serve another term. 

Russ Segner is our current Superintendent and he has indicated that he will not run for another term.

Serving as an officer in the 4D is a privilege and a way of contributing to the ongoing success and enjoyment of our hobby. Officers serve two-year terms.

Nominations need to be in hand by March 1, 2020 with ballots completed by June 15.  If you have questions, contact Russ Segner at 206 200 2211 or russseg@gmail.com or Lisa Murray  at 206 310 6778 or mattinata@outlook.com.

The February 2020 Eastside Get Together Clinic will meet WEDNESDAY, February 19, 2020. Please note that the third Wednesday is our new meeting day going forward until the June 2020 clinic.

The Clinic will meet at the:
Redmond Community Center at Marymoor Village
6505 176TH AVE NE, Rm. 202
REDMOND WA 98052-4930

Doors open at 7:00 PM and meeting starts promptly at 7:15 PM

Since last month’s clinic was cancelled due to snow, let’s start off the first clinic of the New Year by bringing our best models, projects and photos to the clinic for the new “Bring, Show and Brag” portion of the clinic and show off what we’ve been up to in our train rooms so far this winter! Be prepared to talk to the group for a couple of minutes about the models or photos that you brought to show. The results from our voting have been tabulated for the “Mini Clinic Event” topics. The top four most voted for topics are:
• Wiring for DCC, Bus and feeder wires, Accessories
• Servo switch machines
• Fine-tuning and maintaining locos
• Weathering rolling stock and/or engines

Although I already have a volunteer for the DCC clinic, at this point, I still need three more volunteers to step forward for the other three topics.

This month’s program will be presented by Nick Muff and Al Carter from Mt. Vernon, WA. They will present their outstanding clinic on “Decaling”. I’m sure we’ve all, at one point or another, applied decals to our models. Sometimes with less than desired results. So, come to Wednesday’s clinic and learn about different techniques for applying decals of different types to various types of surfaces. This promises to be a very informative and interesting clinic.
We will also have refreshments and snacks available as always.
See you there!!
By Alex Brikoff, 02/12/2020