Gordon Garnhart

There were 22 people gathered at the Summer Hill Retirement Community conference room on October 13th. The meeting was started with Steve Jaffrey, as project superintendent, presenting a first draft and distributing copies of the rules for the upcoming scratch built structure competition. Finalized contest rules will be distributed at a later date.

Susan Gonzales distributed copies of the newly revised and updated list of books, annuals, catalogs, DVDs, handbooks, journals, magazines, VHS tapes and other literature that various members have in their personal libraries and have made available for others to use.

The featured speaker for the evening was John White, who repeated the talk he delivered at the banquet for the Pacific Northwest Regional Convention in September in Lynnwood, Washington. His subject, “Development of the Concrete Tie Market in North America”, was well prepared, well delivered and well received. His talk was accompanied by a series of very descriptive slides. This was a very personal story of John’s involvement with concrete ties from 1972 to 1999. This covers the period when there was no market for concrete ties until there were seven plants making nearly two million ties a year, three of which were owned by the company he founded. His presentation was a mixture of history and anecdotes of the challenges he faced to get the product accepted by some very skeptical railroads interlaced with additional details of production challenges with all new equipment. A lively question and answer period followed.

We will next meet on Wednesday, November 10th when Roger Ferris will bring some estate sale offerings and will also lead a Make & Take session.

The meeting was concluded with the usual drawing for several door prizes generously donated by Performance R/C Hobbies on Fairhaven Avenue in Burlington.