Railpro Meet 2019

[KPack]

A big thank you to Lee and his lovely wife for opening their home for us this last weekend.  They graciously allowed a group of Railpro die-hard's and some other regulars to descend on their basement and generally make a mess of the layout.  A great time was had by all.  I really enjoyed meeting in person all the people who are part of this forum.

Lee's layout is simply a masterpiece.  It ran nearly flawlessly, has full CTC signaling, dispatcher with CTC board, integrated phone system, ingenious powered switches, and every scene is complete with full scenery and backdrop.  It's almost as much fun to just walk around and look at it as it is to operate on it.

Following are a few pictures I took while waiting for my name to get called on the pool jobs.  I didn't bring my tripod so the pictures aren't as good as I would like.



One of the many coal mines on the layout that is served by CB&Q


These next pictures are all from Flannigan....an operator works the yard here and services all these industries.  Trains come in and drop/pickup whatever cars are on their list.










Everything has finished scenery like this:


Engine terminal at East Yard


Power for the Jiggs Tramp


Bill working the Jiggs Tramp and Bruce drilling in the East Yard


Lee and Ed discussing how the sugar beets are to spotted and pulled at Brimley Sugar


UCW power on one of the mixed freights


A really bad picture of East Yard


Tower at East Yard.  The switches operate by pushing down on the switch stand....it activates the switch motor to flip the switch points


Dispatcher's office.  That CTC is no joke....it works just like a prototype CTC board.


Signals at Clayton Yard.  I worked this yard on the second day and didn't screw things up too badly.


My absolute favorite scene on the layout.  Rob Spangler painted the backdrops.


Loading dock at Brimley Sugar, as well as coal and aggregate pits.  Every door is a car spot.


Shasta Station at East Yard.  Passenger trains stop at designated stations throughout the layout.


Some of the detail around Clayton Yard


From right to left....CB&Q mainline, UCW siding, UCW mainline, Brimley Sugar spur and industry tracks.


-Kevin

[KPack]

Post #2

A couple of cell phone grabs now.

The crew meets on Friday morning for introductions, train assignments and general operating rules.




Bill and I prior to ops


Lovely scenery.  The backdrop blends right in.


Panorama of the main aisle.  Clayton Yard, Jiggs, Brimley Sugar, and East Yard all pictured.  Click on link to view.
https://bn1302files.storage.live.com/y4p0INIzdu23ChABN-0hLNZoogTSj6Xhu9LdmIZbOnYmrV_Q9uO5Gcu6b5fdHT639qiBuvVi4PUi9zitqtAXAo8A93ombSWXGngm8OOBCTfONStAlVP8RhVJ7PJtef5IfcrTTFeWB6vzgta_d7yK9fpLO4JFUKhZqMJ-mO8dE-Q9DsncBqFneQAjTniyGqLt12898n0H-GiUJIf7GIEEGz6Hu8gWAkhrYZD4hqiuLMQYyk/20190913_142220.jpg?psid=1&width=1920&height=132

-Kevin

[nodcc4me]

What a nice layout! Wish I could have been there. Thanks for the pictures, Kevin. 

[CPRail]

Thanks for all the pics Kevin and thanks to Lee for hosting! Wish I could've made it out on this trip, as I've been aware of the UCW ever since Lee bucked the trend from DCC way back when with his use of RailLynx and now RailPro and have been eager to see more. Thankfully the recent article in RMC helped.

Nice to put another face to a name.

Hopefully Lee will be willing to do another Meet in the future.

Cheers!

[BruceRogers]

Kevin,
Nice post, it was great to meet you and everyone else. I'm not much of an operations guy but I had a blast.
Lee Nicolas thanks for making this all possible.

[KPack]

Thanks guys, glad you like the pictures.  I wish I could've taken more.

Railpro ran great all weekend.  Lee has keep-alives in all his locomotives and never once did I experience a power-drop.....and to my knowledge no one else did either.  I didn't see any issues with throttles or communication either.

There were a couple of things that we all discussed and would like to see changed.  The two largest ones were:
1.) don't shut the locomotive down for a "motor overload current" fault.  Rather, just send a warning and continue running.  The problem is that when one of the following locomotives in a MU has a motor overload fault, it shuts off the locomotive and never informs you what happened (you're controlling the consist from the lead locomotive).  At some point you realize that the lead locomotive is dragging the follower around because the motor has no power.  You then need to tip the faulty locomotive off the track, bleed the keep alive dry, and reset the locomotive.

2.) Make some way to "lock" the locomotive control screen.  This isn't a huge deal for experienced Railpro users, but the people who aren't familiar with it constantly press something on the locomotive control screen that takes them somewhere they don't want to be (settings, status, locomotive selection screen, etc) and they don't know how to get back to it.  Meanwhile their train is happily moving along without control. 

There were some other things I don't remember, but these were the two main ones.  I'm always pushing for more sound.....good quality sounds make me happy.  Fortunately Ring has a ton of good recordings in his hands.  Unfortunately it takes time for those recordings to get released.

-Kevin

[William Brillinger]

Thanks for posting some of your pictures Kevin, It was great to meet you, Geoff Carter, Bruce Rogers, Rod Loder, and a bunch of other RailPro users. Lee's layout is fun to operate on, and runs very well, and Lee is a terrific host. I look forward to doing it again some day!

[KPack]

Anyone else have any pictures they want to add?  I've got some videos I need to upload at some point.

[ON28]

Thanks for the report, always good to see Lee's work!

[William Brillinger]

I'll post some pictures later today too.

[William Brillinger]

Here are some of my photos from the Meet that are not duplicates of Kevin's

Ops Day 1:



Jobs are assigned by draw. I was hoping to have the Jiggs Tramp job because I have run it before and I really enjoyed it.
I was lucky enough to get it too!

This photo shows the Job assignments. There are also operators assigned to the pool.
Pool is a good job to get familiar with the layout as you get to run the road trains that cross the entire layout.



Here's my power for the Jiggs Tramp...



Here we see Kevin running a pool train...



At both ends of the Jiggs siding there are locked switches that cannot be thrown without communicating with dispatch.
I was on the phone A LOT.



Here's the Jiggs Tramp pulling a cut of Beet Cars from Brimley Sugar...



Day 2.

I was hoping for the Flanagan job this day, and I pulled the highest number in the box for job selections. Things weren't looking good for me until Geoff Carter Slips me his number 1 and says he just want's pool. Thanks Geoff!

Flanagan get's a pair of RS-1's. I love RS-1's!



In this photo I have caught up from my earlier mistakes and I have my cars ready for the next train.
Here Daland and I are discussing our moves to hand off the cars we have for each other.



The day is almost over and I'm just about done at Flanagan.



Things are heating up in the yard as they reconcile the paperwork.
Sounds like there are a few cars to find still.



For anyone interested in the rest of my trip, feel free to check out my facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/WilliamBrillinger

Cheers!

[ON28]

Great photos! Lee's use of black fascia and valance makes for a beautiful museum-like presentation.

[Alan]

Yes, great photos. Thanks for posting. Lee's layout looks like fun and is very well presented. Am sure all of you had a great time.

As a side note, Lee you look like you could be my boss's brother. Amazing how similar you and he look.

[nodcc4me]

Bill, thanks to you as well for bringing us along with pictures. I am not aware of any other extensive layouts like Lee’s that run on RailPro. Must have been a lot of fun with everyone running RP.

[drisdon]

This looks like a really fun time!  If it wasn't for having already spent my available model railroad travel funds/time in Salt Lake City for the National Train Show in July I may have been able to attend.  Perhaps I could attend in 2020 assuming Lee hosts it again.  I can get pretty cheap flights from Sacramento to SLC.

Several years ago, 2008 I believe, Lee hosted my wife and I for a layout tour when we passed thru SLC on a family vacation.  It's great to see that his already impressive layout then was made even better now with the implementation of Railpro.


Dan Risdon