By Jeff Moorman

Our next meeting is Thursday, November 3. Time and place are at the end of this piece.

Jim B in his role as chief cook and bottle washer of Sound & Northwestern LLC brought along the box for the company’s next kit. It is a GN Standard Portable Depot and should be available next month through the Great Northern Historical Society. Apparently the railroad pre-built these in their carpentry shop, loaded them on flatcars, and delivered them wherever they needed a small town deport.

As promised we assembled the first T-Trak “layout” using only models built by Seattle-North regulars. Dennis T and yours truly supplied the trackage, which ended up more of an oval with a branch line than a simple loop.

Rob J showed some N gauge cabeese and a lovely Hiawatha set in that scale. Dennis T had an HO “Piker” he built from an old Walthers kit. Wow, that brought back a bunch of memories. But the stars of show & tell were three Canadian prototype HO diesels brought by Greg, who was attending the clinic for the first time. Nice work, Greg, and we hope you’ll be back.

Rob's N Hiawatha

N T-TRAK Module

Greg's Diesels

We started an informal discussion of Digital Command Control (DCC) to sort of judge everyone’s knowledge of the subject. And we got a range of feedback. A couple of folks were experienced in applying custom settings to locomotives and a couple could hardly spell DCC. So, when we start learning about DCC in earnest, we’ll make sure we start at the beginning.

Speaking of the beginning, when was the first product sold to allow remote (non-wired) control of electric trains? Well, according to Kalmbach’s book DCC Made Easy by Lionel Strang, that would be sometime in the 1940’s. That is when Lionel came out with a two-channel, frequency control system that allowed you to change the direction of the train.

Our exploration of DCC will get more formal in November when Di Voss will be on hand as our expert clinician. And we’ll see is anyone can top those HO diesels that showed up for last meeting’s show and tell.

We meet at the Ronald United Methodist Church, 17839 Aurora Avenue North, Shoreline, WA. That is on the west side of Aurora (State Route 99) between 175th and 185th Streets and more specifically, between the Cadillac dealer on the south and Deseret Industries to the north. You can no longer make cross-traffic turns on Aurora, so you need to be going southbound (so you can make a right-hand turn into the church driveway immediately after passing the Deseret location).

Meetings are the first Thursday of each month, except July and August. However, in June we usually do a tour. For regular meetings enter the lower level of the church from the parking lot at the rear. Doors open around 7:00 PM, announcements at 7:15, and the program starts about 7:30. Hope to see you there or at least sometime on down the line.

The next meeting is November 3 and the one after that is December 1.