2014 NMRA National Train Show

**zephyr1934** · July 22, 2014

I just finished up a mighty fine weekend at the 2014 NMRA National Train Show this past weekend. NeoLUG was the host club with separate layouts from Michlug and my group, COLTC. My photos can be found here. I tried to get a sampling of the three different layouts in the photos, but you will find a predominance of COLTC shots in general and trains in particular. I brought 12 boxes of trains and laid out some classic MOCs from almost ten years ago along side my newest MOCs.

The layout was nice, while far from a prototypical railroad, it was nice to have separate yards for passenger trains, freight cars, a locomotive facility (in the shape of a faux roundhouse- missing the building and turntable, but allowing us to display several more MOCs in detail) and caboose tracks (to the left of the locomotive facility in the last thumbnail)

Just about everything in the yards that could run did run. I found the two long passenger trains (both PF and each with a pair of train motors off of a single V1 IR receiver) did not like being in more than one curve at a time, the long cars just created too much drag and the receiver would trip out. So I had to shorten the trains so that they would stretch from edge of one curve to the edge of the next curve and then they ran just fine. I switched over to my PF pacific with two XL motors in the tender, and that was a different story. During the last hour of the show I was pulling a 35 car freight train with no problems. I could have gone longer, but I was too tired to mess with the rare earth magnets. So this long train ran with the just the normal lego magnets.

Besides getting double takes from the conventional modelers when they saw some of the trains and several questions about where one can buy these sets, it was nice to get so many different trains running over the weekend.