Newsletter of the Carolina Southern Division 12, Mid-Eastern Region,National Model Railroad Association

Volume 16 Number 6 November-December 2016

Superintendent's CornerBy Alan Hardee

It’s hard to believe that it’s November already. Let’stake a look back at Division 12 activities for Septem-ber and October. Jack Parker, MMR once againhosted the annual picnic at his home on Mountain Is-land Lake. Mother Nature played her part and pro-vided us with a warm and sunny afternoon. Divisionmembers enjoyed great food and fellowship and evengot to meet some of our newest members. Thanks toJack’s son for cooking the hot dogs and burgers forus. Seth Gartner hosted an operation session on hisHO scale New York Central layout for our Octobermeeting. Everyone had wonderful time learning aboutoperations with train orders from a dispatcher. Youcan view a few photos of Seth’s layout on the Caro-lina Southern Facebook page. (Ed Note: see later inthis Newsletter.) Speaking of Jack and Seth. LouSassi came down to photograph both layouts for fu-ture publication in Model Railroader Magazine. Noword on when they will appear, but we look forward toseeing our member’s layouts on the national level.

Our next big event was the Mid-Eastern RegionalConvention hosted by our sister division, CarolinaPiedmont Division 13 in Durham RTP October 20 -23.The convention had something for everyone, contestroom, silent auction room, clinics, layout tours and op-eration sessions. We had a good showing of mem-bers from Div. 12 attending. 13 members includingNeal Anderson, Dick Bronson, Dave Chance, MicheleChance, Seth Gartner, Bob Halsey, Alan Hardee

The Brass Pounder Volum

28278.

Division ComingEvents

(See CSD Web-site for further

details)

Nov 12, 2016Division Monthly

event:Swap Meet &

ShowWade’s Train

TownHickory, NC

Other Events

Metrolina ModelRR Club display –Southern Christ-

mas showNov 10th – 20th

January 21, 2017Annual RailroadModelers Univ

(RMU)Christ the King

Lutheran Church13501 SouthTryon Street,Charlotte, NC

e 16 No 6 Page 1 November-December 2016

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Jack Haynes, Fred Miller, Jack Mon-ette, Jack Parker, Tim Rump . I Hope Ididn’t miss anyone. Neal, Dick andFred presented clinics that were wellattended and received positive com-ments. You can catch these again dur-ing our RMU in January.

The next Div.12 activity will be a swapmeet and meeting at Brookford Com-munity Center in Hickory on November12.

November and December brings a lotof holiday train displays to our area.Metrolina Model Railroaders will havetheir HO scale French Broad and Ca-tawba modular layout on display at theSouthern Christmas Show in Charlotteat The Park. The 10 day show openson Nov. 10 and runs through the 20th.Metrolina needs help manning the lay-out for the long schedule. Slots are stillavailable if you would like to volunteerfor a few shifts. Contact me at alan-hardee@att.net to sign up. DanielStowe Botanical Gardens offers a fan-tastic holiday light display fromThanksgiving through Jan 2nd. Severaldifferent trains, including a smaller Me-trolina layout, are on display at DSBGduring this time. The Holidays andmodel railroading share a magicalbond. As you enjoy the Holidays, besure to include some model railroadingto keep those holiday memories alive.Happy Holidays from my family toyours.

Editor's NotesBy Fred Miller, MMR

Carolina Southern division was wellrepresented at the Tracks to theTriangle MER convention last monthin Durham, NC. It was a good meetin a very accommodating facility(and close by). See Bob Halsey’sreport of his experiences at theconvention, in the article below.

Next year’s MER convention will bein Harrisburg, PA, in October 2017 Dotry to make it – the MER conven-tions are a lot of fun - certainlycloser and cheaper than the Na-tional Annual conventions.

Don’t forget our Swap Meet comingup as the November division meet –see Gil’s report later in this issue.

Best wishes for your upcoming holi-days

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We Went to the 2016 MERConvention!By Bob Halsey

And those of us from the CarolinaSouthern Division who went (14 total)were very glad we did! Neal Andersonand I car-pooled and shared a room,

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which is the best way to keep your ex-penses down, along with bringing someof your own survival food!

On the way to the Marriott, we visitedMike Pennie’s fantastic N gauge PennCentral/Lehigh Valley layout inGreensboro, and then dropped in onChuck Batherson’s Blue Ridge & WhiteMountain HO layout, also in Greens-boro just a few miles away. TheBR&WM represents northern New Eng-land’s Bangor & Aroostook and Boston& Maine. It is undergoing a major ex-pansion and computerization of thedispatching function, along with someadditional scenery and track ballasting.So the BR&WM will be even better in2017, although it is already a great lay-out! Both Chuck and Mike are givingup hand-held radios in favor of tele-phone contact with the dispatcher.They are also installing small TV cam-eras to allow the dispatcher to see hid-den and remote areas, with the imagesshown on small screens (the type thatare in auto dashboards).

As with all such conventions, there justisn’t enough time to visit all the layouts,or attend all the tours and clinics. Andthere were plenty of them – a total of58 different clinics, all conducted byexperts in each subject. CSD pre-senters included Fred Miller (3 clinics)and Dick Bronson (2 clinics) on variouselectrical and electronic topics, andNeal Anderson (2 clinics – track bal-lasting, and a simple but effective wayto improve layout room lighting. There

were many other very informativepresentations, including scenery clas-ses by Lou Sassi, historical back-grounds of B&O and Southern rollingstock, Pennsy steam locomotives,Long Island Rail Road car float opera-tions, and Pullman car operations.There were also sessions on waterfrontships/boats, making unusual/realisticfreight car loads, and how to match lo-comotive speeds.

Of course, there were the usual ex-tremely well-detailed contest models,with Dave and Michele Chance againserving on the judging committee,along with new judge Neal Anderson.There was also an area for attendeesto display their favorite models (not forjudging), and Neal brought hisC&NW/KK&L ore train – only 70 orecars, although he could have broughtseveral hundred more!

There was a room for silent auctionitems that we could bid on – everythingfrom brass locomotives down to $2boxcars, plus various structure andscenery details. Many of these weredonated by Seth Gartner. This roomwas constantly busy all day long andwell into the evening! Many items weredonated to be raffled off. You bought

Division Website:www.carolinasouthern.org

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your tickets and then put one or moreof them in the box corresponding to theitem(s) that you hoped to win. TheCarolina Piedmont Division did a greatjob hosting this entire event!

There was a small HO layout being raf-fled off by the CPD to support the “Hol-iday Trains for Kids” program, andthere was another layout set up andoperated by the Piedmont RailroadMuseum & Library. The Railroad Pro-totype Modelers (RPM) shared a roomwith the N-Trak folks, who were oper-ating an excellent N-gauge layout. TheRPM members showed some really de-tailed models! Many MER attendeeswent on the Tichy Group tour, and vis-ited the local area layouts.

At the Saturday evening banquet, weheard author/photographer BernieKempinski discuss the problems hehas had in getting technical articles andbooks published (the keys are havingan interesting subject and at least tenespecially good photographs!). Ber-nie’s hobby is Civil War railroading (hehas an O-gauge 1863 Civil War layout)and has written several books, includ-ing the recent Kalmbach book “ModelRailroads Go To War”.

The annual MER membership meetingwas held on Sunday morning. Theydiscussed upcoming regional conven-tions: MER’s next will be in Harrisburg,PA, in October 2017, followed byRockwell, MD, a year later, then Phila-delphia in 2019. Our neighbor region

to the north is having theirs in Louis-ville, KY, in May 2017, and then Cin-cinnati, OH, in 2018. Minutes of thismeeting will be out soon.

So then it was time to leave, but we stillvisited two more layouts. First was JimMurphy’s Connecticut/Massachusettsarea Boston & Maine/ New Havensteam/diesel era extremely well-de-tailed HO layout in Cary. Much of thedetail is thanks to his friend Bill Davis,who won several of the contest prizes,and his wife who painted his back-drops, made the tobacco leaves hang-ing in the barn, and makes very tastylocomotive shaped cookies! Jim andBill made a unique door to the backstaging area involving pulleys and asandbag counterweight that opens andcloses the door while lifting a section oftrack and then sets it back in positionperfectly! This door arrangement is thesubject of a February 2016 article inModel Railroader magazine.

From there we went to Greensboroagain to visit the layouts of the CarolinaModelers – the HO model is of all thelines in the city and it is huge (at least ahundred feet long) and is being con-structed based on aerial photographs.They also have a very well done sepa-rate large N gauge layout and a smallThomas HO set for small visitors. Thebig HO layout still has a lot of work tobe done, but it will be very impressivewhen it is finally completed, and defi-nitely worth a CSD group tour!

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Finally we got back to Neal’s houselate in the day, where his wife showedus photos of the hot air balloons thatpassed overhead all day from theStatesville Balloonfest, which we weretoo busy railroading to go see!

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Seth Gartner’s layout at therecent OPS session

Photos by Alan Hardee

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CALL FOR ARTICLES,NOTICES OR WHAT-

EVER.YOUR EDITOR CAN’TKEEP FILLING UP THEISSUE WITH HIS OWN

MATERIALS.

Next Issue Submission DateJan-Feb 2017 January 1, 2017

Articles are welcome on any railroad topic,model or prototype. The editor is available toassist in preparing the materials.

Editor: Fred Miller, MMR edi-tor@carolinasouthern.org

333 W Trade St #2504Charlotte, NC 28202704-332-1753

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Celebrate National ModelRailroad Month atWade’s Train Town

Come out and help celebrate NationalModel Railroad Month with your mod-eling friends in the Carolina SouthernDivision, NMRA at Wade’s Train Townin the Brookford Community Center,1700 South Center Street, Hickory, NC.We are holding the celebration in con-junction with our monthly open houseon Saturday, November 12th, 10 am – 2pm. Not only will it be an opportunity toswap modeling stories with yourfriends, but you can also participate inour annual Swap Meet, which will beheld at the same time.If you have any ‘excess’ items clutter-ing up your modeling space, you canbring them with you to swap, sell, ortrade with your friends and neighbors.If you would like to do this, please letthe Train Town Project Manage knowso he can reserve free table space foryou. You can do this on the CSD web-site by going to:http://carolinasouthern.org/TrainShowGeneral.htmIf you don’t have enough stuff for a ta-ble, we will have a White Elephant Ta-ble available for those with only one ortwo items. We have invited the sur-rounding community to join us, so thereshould be plenty of opportunities toshare your knowledge and enthusiasmfor the “World’s Greatest Hobby” withthem.

The CSD Board of Directors will alsobe holding a meeting during the eventand you are welcome to come and par-ticipate in that open meeting as well. Ifyou need more information aboutWade’s Train Town, you can take alook at in on the CSD website at:http://carolinasouthern.org/TrainTown.htm .We are looking forward to seeing youthere.

Wade’s Train Town layout:

Carnival Area

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HOBO CAMP

*** NOTICE ***

The RMU team needsyour help.

The 2017 R.M.U. is scheduled for Jan.21, 2017 with a snow date of Jan. 28.We need volunteer help in staffing thisevent. Please consider helping in thefollowing areas:

1. We need three or more persons toman the registration desk. This is anall-day assignment that can be split into

shifts so that no one person will be atthe desk all day. The duties includehanding out registration packets, reg-istering new-comers, answering ques-tions, and making new people feel wel-come.

2. Friday night set up. Six people areneeded here. Duties include, setting uptables and chairs in the various loca-tions and generally doing grunt work forDoug. Setup starts at 7 pm Friday the20th.

3. White elephant table. One or morepersons to man the table, this involveshandling money.

4. Six persons are needed to help teardown on Saturday after the R.M.U.

To volunteer please contact Jack Mon-ette at jackmonette@windstream.net orcall 704-788-2856. Let’s work togetherto make this the best R.M.U. ever!

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What is RMU (RailroadModerer’s University)?

It is a place to discover the fun of mod-el railroading. You do not have to be anNMRA member to attend; the event isopen to the public, but registration isrequired. Master Model Railroadersand just 'Plain Ole Modelers' conductclinics (short classes in 'model railroadspeak') and hold demonstrations (lab-work in 'university speak') about the

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various aspects of model railroading.The mission is simple: To provide avenue where modelers, from beginnersto experts, are introduced to:

(1) New concepts and techniqueswhich will assist them in takingtheir layouts and models to ahigher level, and;

(2) Fellow modelers who will be-come friends and mentors.

The January 2017 RMU is again shap-ing up to be an enjoyable and in-formative event

.

Class conducted by Jack Haynes atthe 2015 RMU

23 classes are planned. Here’s theschedule as it stands now:

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Some Photos from RMUs of the past

Division Brass

Superintendent Alan Hardee superintendent@carolinasouthern.orgAsst. Superintendent Larry Paffrath assistsuper@carolinasouthern.orgClerk Fred Miller clerk@carolinasouthern.orgPaymaster John Stevens Paymaster@carolinasouthern.orgDirector 2016 Blayne Olsen director1@carolinasouthern.orgDirector 2017 Roy Becker director2@carolinasouthern.orgDirector 2018 Gil Brauch director3@carolinasouthern.orgAP Chairman Dave Chance Apchair@carolinasouthern.orgWebmaster Gil Brauch Webmaster@carolinasouthern.orgNewsletter Editor Fred Miller, MMR editor@carolinasouthern.orgProgram Chair Andrew Stitt program@carolinasouthern.orgRMU Chair Doug Algire RMUchair@carolinasouthern.orgPublicity Chair Marcus Neubacher publicity@carolinasouthern.orgMembership Nancy Campbell membership@carolinasouthern.org