Caboose Junction JUL 2015: FEC101 Jul 17, 2015

Trains,Trains,Trains 2015

For the 9th consecutive year on the fourth Saturday of July, Florida East Coast Railway Society’s FECNTRAK group displayed their modeling prowess and train operation skills by setting up their operating model of the Florida East Coast Railway at the Brevard County Regional Library in Cocoa, FL.
The layout faithfully reproduces in modular form many segments of the real-life 351-mile long FEC Railway in 150 linear feet of N-gauge track. Locations such as Hialeah Yard, Medley, a working drawbridge at Jupiter, the industrial area at Bonaventure, the rock yard at City Point, and many others along the line are easily recognized by those familiar with real-life FEC territory.
Friday July 24th was spent hauling in all the modules and setting up the layout. The Trains,Trains,Trains event itself occurred on Saturday the 25th from 10AM to 3:30PM, open to the public for a really good price (FREE!). A narrated morning operating session realistically reproduced many actual FEC Railway train movements. During the noon break, in an adjacent room, collector and model train expert Jerry Groothouse presented a well-attended talk on steam trains. He and Richard Benjamin also had a lot of FEC and other railroad memorabilia on display. Jeff and Jacob Smith were right there to help with those beautiful display cases. Gerald Capen assisted and donned a FEC conductor uniform to help entertain the crowd. Congrats to our newest conductor, Gerald.
Representatives Ali Soule and Trent from All Aboard Florida enjoyed running the trains and earning Jr Engineer Cards. They were on hand in the layout room with souvenirs and to discuss All Aboard’s plans and progress for the Miami-Orlando high speed passenger rail system. All Aboard is targeting April 2017 as the startup date for service over the Miami-West Palm Beach segment.
Dave and Ruth Kolodgie joined us and Dave demonstrated a working telegraph sounder for our audience. Tom and Mary Facey representing TRF Hobbies deomstrated the latest N scale electronic products.
Conductor Caboose Mikey Starck provided running commentary over the PA system for the crowd about FEC train operations during the morning operating session. Never at a loss for words, during the afternoon session, he and Conductor Del Kittendorf also coordinated the junior engineers by calling out signup numbers and assigning them to their FECNTRAK engineer instructors, who showed them the controls and then supervised their train running session over the layout. Throughout the entire event Caboose roamed the layout with wireless microphone in hand describing train operations and coordinating junior engineers for everyone to hear over the room PA system. Maybe we should change his nickname from Caboose Mikey to Wireless Mikey.
This year’s Trains,Trains,Trains event was the best-attended ever. A line waiting for the layout to re-open after the lunch hour at 1pm snaked all the way from the layout room to the library checkout desk. Junior engineers earning their train running cards totaled 127 this year, the most engineers in the history of the event!
It is gratifying to kind of stand to one side and watch the reactions of the little ones to the trains and the layout. There seems to be three kinds of junior engineers: the eager ones, who can’t wait to run, the shy ones, who aren’t really sure what to do, but they just want to run the train, and the wide-eyed ones, seemingly mesmerized by it all. Some of them could care less if Mom or Dad stays around, but there are always a few who don’t want Mom or Dad too far away either. Some junior engineers come back for more. After their operating session, they go back to stand in line, with varying degrees of patience, to sign up for another one.
One Dad mentioned that his 8 year old son didn’t want to come, even asked Dad to get a babysitter so he could stay home. But Dad forced the issue. His son came anyway, and he ran a train. Guess what! He was one of the kids who went back to stand in line for another operating session.
Just for kids you might say. Oh not at all. The adults enjoy the trains just as much as the little ones. After all what are adults, but just grown up kids. Trains appeal to all ages, and we might add, both genders. Quite a few young ladies became Junior Engineers. One hope of the FECRS is that a goodly number of the little ones will catch the train “fever” and become railfans. And maybe, just maybe, as a result, some of them while growing up, will spend less time on videogames and more time building models or watching trains.
Congratulations and a big thank you to Tom Chaffee, Gregg Stoll, Tom Loshe, Bob Arceneaux, Austin Strenecky, Joe Strenecky, Caboose Mikey and Mrs. Caboose, Del Kittendorf, Cece and Keegan Ford, Richard Clemons, President Jim Kovalsky, Bob Lowry and everyone else who once again worked so hard to make Trains Train Trains a successful event. Always a pleasure to see FECRS members Bob Scidmore, Bill Ritter, Richard Burns, Richard and Dorothy Hansen and Dave Didas.
The FECRS wishes to thank the Central Brevard Regional Library and Reference Center and Head Librarian Jan Erickson for once again hosting TRAINS,TRAINS,TRAINS and making the Society welcome. Wow! Nine years now.
And the ladies at the gift shop auctioned a beautiful signed/numbered print of Southern Locomotive 1401 for us train fans right at closing time.
And come on Tom Loshe, when are you going to leverage your great work on the Jupiter drawbridge into a working model of the Strauss Trunnion bascule drawbridge across the St. Johns River in Jacksonville? Now there is a modeler’s challenge.
By Bob Lowry with cabooseMikey.

Caboose Junction JUL 2015

TRAINS,TRAINS,TRAINS2015

FEC101 Jul 17, 2015

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