by Syd Schofield

The February gathering of the National Model Railroad Association 4th Division of the Pacific Northwest Region took place at the Northwest Railroad Archives building on 153rd Street in Burien, Washington. The Archives shares a duplex storefront with the Boeing Employees Model Railroad club layout. Interested folks started drifting in around 6:30 Thursday evening. Russ Segner called attention to the program around seven o’clock.

After the usual model railroading small talk and things of interest happening around the area, Russ showed a video, mostly by Jim Sabol and Gary Haack on railroad-related logging near the west coast. The video showed activities in some of the many railroads and how the ingenious, hardworking folks took out trees for building materials supporting much of America. A follow-on video will be shown sometime in the near future.

The clinic for next month (March) will be given by Brian Pickering on the subject of Digital Command and Control systems used in model railroading. The introduction of DCC has allowed much more operating facilities than the original direct current (and even alternating current found in the tinplate systems). The concept uses the two (or three) rails as a digital signal bus as well as a power bus to communicate with and provide electric power to the model trains. This feature allows many functions not available with the standard power-only systems for one or even hundreds of trains simultaneously on the same track.