Elkhart Model Railroad Club Announcements
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July 13, 2018
Also the south end facia is completed thanks to members Paul Ewing, Gabe Smith and Charlie Yoakam. We also found out we have a contract with a Nappanee Indiana area 20,000 sq.ft. banquet hall for the 2019 Nappanee Train Show. After July's business meeting there will be much more information to come on the show. Also look for an update on the new N-Scale layout next week. President Chuck Hart has been diligently working on the layout and is in the middle of installing Tortoise switch machines in the areas that can't be easily reached. Other news includes the Indiana Transportation Museum's move out of Noblesville, Indiana. 
ITM Director of Assets, Josh Spencer and Chris Campbell of Kentucky Steam announced the two entities signed an agreement that rescues the 587 by taking her out of Noblesville and places her under the protection of the Kentucky restoration group until she's restored. Once she's all shined up, she will be back in Indiana , proudly remaining ITM's crown jewel. 
EMRRC had an a donor give us several boxes of HO equipment. Joseph Cipalla admires one of the many cars that was donated. We had a good turnout of members show up for open running Friday night. 
One of the interesting locomotives that showed up was a General Electric Tier 4 GEVo Series demonstrator The EPA “Tier” emissions standards are a series, or Tiers, of allowable emissions levels based upon a locomotives’ date of manufacture. The highest and most stringent tier level, Tier 4, sets maximum allowable NOx and hydrocarbon emissions levels for locomotives built for domestic use 2015 onward. While similar in appearance to previous GE GEVo designs, the Tier 4 models featured a longer frame compared to their predecessors. This allows for a larger radiator “cab” (GE refers to the various sections of the long hood as “cabs”), and a "hump" over the engine cab for advanced exhaust treatment equipment. Initially, a boxy housing filled the entire roofline on the blue-painted field test/demonstrator units. Due to changes in treatment equipment and clearance issues, the "hump" would decrease in size and shape into a boxy compartment around the exhaust on initial production units. 
This culminated in an angled compartment surrounding the exhaust manifold on the latest production versions (2016+). Despite boxier engine cab rooflines and a radically styled radiator cab, the basic Tier 4 design shares a family appearance with GE safety cab-equipped units going back to the DASH-9s of the 1990s. It even includes the same 12-cylinder GEVo-12 series prime mover and 4,400hp as its predecessor model. The unit shown is a GECX Pre-Production/Field Test Demonstrator ET44AC by ScaleTrains.com. It is the first model in HO scale and is officially licensed by GE. The demonstrator units traveled extensively across the US and were built in 2013. 
Besides the 2024 we have lots of locomotives and trains to show you this week. Take a look at the Friday Night Pictures at the Club section. We changed it up to show current pictures from the club. Some are on this page but several we didn't have room for are included in the Friday Night Pictures. Click here to take a look. As always for the latest video Click here to check out all the action from this week. Also click here for the latest weekly report on train shows and swap meets in the area (this is the latest list) courtesy of Grand River Valley Railroad Club in Wyoming, MI. Also here's an announcement on a great NMRA conference coming up on September 21st and 22nd in South Bend, IN. The presenters are well known in railroad modeling and include Jim Six who is modeling Sturgis Michigan and has an extensive blog at Railroad Model Hobbiest and Tom Johnson the creator of the Logansport and Indiana Northern Railroad. Registration information is at www.michiana-nmra.org. Here's a link to the flyer. If you have missed any of our previous months we store those under 2018 Past Announcements. Here's a link to that archive. Hopefully next week we will have a seperate section on the 2019 Train Show be sure to look for it.
July 6, 2018
Some major decisions made were to replace the roundhouses and machinery building with a new roundhouse and open concrete pad area with an overhead crane. The turntable will remain in place and the roundhouse area will be based on and extend from the turntable. Lifetime member Stan Shatto told us the area the roundhouse sets in used to be a mountain. The track ran through the wall to the roundhouse facility set in our kitchen area in the 1970s. Also a new switch will be added to the single track mainline connecting it to the drill track for the yard so the drill track can also be used as a run around track into the yard off of the main. 
In other news the Indiana Transportation Museum in Noblesville, Indiana has been given until July 12 to vacate its longtime home at Forest Park in Noblesville. The museum is about 120 miles from us. In an order issued Friday, a Hamilton Circuit Court Judge denied a request by the transportation museum, which has occupied about 10 acres in Forest Park since the 1970s, for a preliminary injunction to delay its eviction. The museum has a memorandum of understanding to move to Logansport, about 60 miles from Noblesville, but museum officials say it will take time to safely move and preserve 78 historic train cars and engines, several buildings including the historic Hobbs Station, and more than three miles of track and switches. They also asked the court to require the Hoosier Heritage Port Authority to give the museum access to the rail line to move equipment. The judge denied those requests and ordered the transportation museum to immediately vacate the site. On July 13, the city will be granted possession of the property to clean up whatever property remains, if it chooses to do so. An army of volunteers, heavy equipment movers, cranes and many other pieces of heavy equipment and operators have descended on the museum for the last 2 weeks to save as many pieces of history as possible. Several of these volunteers are from the Hesston Steam Museum in our area. Hesston is involved in the emergency removal of Indianapolis Power and Light 0-4-0F #1. #1 was built by the H.K. Porter Company in 1950. The engine is a non-combustible design known as the fireless locomotive. It essentially used a pressurized cylinder of steam and hot water to power the pistons and rods. Click Here for a Facebook video on the removal by Hesston volunteers. Several EMRRC members are also volunteers at Hesston. Kentucky Steam Heritage has rescued NKP 587. Nickel Plate Road 587 is a USRA Light 2–8–2 steam locomotive built in August 1918 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works for the Lake Erie and Western Railroad as its number 5541. In 1923, the LE&W was merged into the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, ("Nickel Plate Road"), and allocated 587 as its new number in 1924. NKP No. 587 was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works. However, its cylinders were replaced with Lima Locomotive Works (LLW) castings during its December, 1943 overhaul. The Indiana Transportation Museum was in the midst of a restoration of 587 when the bad news broke. ITM will retain ownership of NKP 587 Kentucky Steam Heritage will continue the restoration to bring it back to operating condition.
The Fort Wayne Historical Society owners of several Nickel Plate engines including Berkshire #765 also sent several volunteers and experts to help in the move. After some sobering news on the fate of the Indiana Transportation Museum we moved on to running trains on the first meeting of July 2018. By joneau261 - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11820471
We had fewer trains running this session but enough to put together a video of highlights. You can watch the video on our Friday Night Running at the Club page. Click here to check out all the action from this week. Also click here for the latest weekly report on train shows and swap meets in the area (this is the latest list) courtesy of Grand River Valley Railroad Club in Wyoming, MI. Also here's an announcement on a great NMRA conference coming up on September 21st and 22nd in South Bend, IN. The presenters are well known in railroad modeling and include Jim Six who is modeling Sturgis Michigan and has an extensive blog at Railroad Model Hobbiest and Tom Johnson the creator of the Logansport and Indiana Northern Railroad. Registration information is at www.michiana-nmra.org. Here's a link to the flyer.To see the pictures that didn't make it to the home page click here for our Friday Night Pictures at the Club. NEWS for June 2018
June 29, 2018
June 29, 2018
Enough of the morbid fun, sorry I was watching Svengoolie while I was putting this together. We had several interesting trains show up among them a High Capacity Railroad Tank Car for Cryogenic Fluids, or Cryogenic Tank Cars for short. They are used for the transportation of super-cold fluids such as liquid oxygen, nitrogen and argon. These tank cars solved the problem of maintaining extremely low temperatures while transporting large quantities of these materials over long distances. Curious as to how cold these cars could keep liquid oxygen? How about -297 degrees F. Liquid nitrogen kept at -320 F. And liquid argon at -302 degrees F. Now, that's cold! These high
We have lots of locomotives and trains to show you this week. Take a look at the Friday Night Pictures at the Club section. We changed it up to show current pictures from the club. Some are on this page but several we didn't have room for are included in the Friday Night Pictures. Click here to take a look. As always for the latest video Click here to check out all the action from this week. Also click here for the latest weekly report on train shows and swap meets in the area (this is the latest list) courtesy of Grand River Valley Railroad Club in Wyoming, MI. Also here's an announcement on a great NMRA conference coming up on September 21st and 22nd in South Bend, IN. The presenters are well known in railroad modeling and include Jim Six who is modeling Sturgis Michigan and has an extensive blog at Railroad Model Hobbiest and Tom Johnson the creator of the Logansport and Indiana Northern Railroad. Registration information is at www.michiana-nmra.org. Here's a link to the flyer. June 22, 2018
While the weather remained humid and rainy outside, running trains was hot and heavy inside the Elkhart Model Railroad Club Friday night. We usually run operations the 4th Friday of the month but our chief dispatcher had to work overtime. Some of us have real jobs that get in the way of the important things in life like operating trains. Since we didn't have our main dispatcher and we had 4 visitors show up we decided to have an open run night. As always lots of trains running 
and some runaways and missing trains that had followed members home knowing they would get a good home with plenty of running on a great model railroad layout. 
One discussion I had was on the only steam turbine engine version built in the US for the PRR. Here's a Youtube link that will give you and idea of what this beast would have sounded like. This steam turbine is still running in Sweden Steam Turbine Sweden. and there's definitly no chuffing sound sound to this loco.The Pennsylvania Railroad's class S2 was a steam turbine locomotive designed and built in a collaborative effort by Baldwin Locomotive Works and Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, as an attempt to prolong the dominance of the steam locomotive by adapting technology that had been widely accepted in the marine industry. One was built, #6200, delivered in September 1944. The S2 was the sole example of the 6-8-6 wheel arrangement in the Whyte notation, with a six-wheel leading truck, eight driving wheels, and a six-wheel trailing truck. The S2 used a direct-drive steam turbine provided by the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, geared to the center pair of axles with the outer two axles connected by side rods; the fixed gear ratio was 18.5:1. Such design was to prevent energy loss and S2 achieved a mechanical efficiency of 97% which means only 3% of steam energy was lost within the propulsion equipment. The disadvantage of direct-drive steam turbine was that the turbine could not operate at optimal speeds over the locomotive's entire speed range. The S2 was the largest, heaviest and
fastest direct-drive turbine locomotive ever designed or built. It was easily capable of maintaining 100 mph constantly over the miles. The S2 was assigned to the Fort Wayne Division and based at the Crestline engine-house. I'm sure it made it through the Warsaw, Indiana and Plymouth, Indiana areas several times. It hauled various prestigious passenger trains serving the New York to Chicago corridor such as The Broadway Limited, The Liberty Limited, The Trail Blazer, The General, The Manhattan Limited and The Golden Arrow on the route between Chicago and Crestline, Ohio. Unfortunately the S2 was short-lived. It was built in 1944, stored in 1949 and scrapped in 1952. There were a lot of the reasons for it's short life, chief among them the steam era was drawing to a close and even though the S2 was efficient at high speeds, it wasn't at low speeds. There's a ton of information online and Broadway Limited built a brass hybyrd HO-Scale model of the engine. Every week we try to bring you all the latest action with our video and some info on swap meets and train shows. We have lots of locomotives and trains to show you so Click here to check out all the action from this week. As always click here for the latest weekly report on train shows and swap meets in the area (this is the latest list) courtesy of Grand River Valley Railroad Club in Wyoming, MI. Also here's an announcement on a great NMRA conference coming up on September 21st and 22nd in South Bend, IN. The presenters are well known in railroad modeling and include Jim Six who is modeling Sturgis Michigan and has an extensive blog at Railroad Model Hobbiest and Tom Johnson the creator of the Logansport and Indiana Northern Railroad. Registration information is at www.michiana-nmra.org. Here's a link to the flyer.
June 15, 2018
The weather turned hot so of course maintenance continues on the outside of the building I kept looking for Richard Simmons and "Sweatin to the Oldies" as a group of the older members (guys who are experienced in carpentry) tackled the soffits on the outside of the building. A lot of progress was made and one more evening of work should give us a maintenece-free soffit and fascia unless we kill off one these guys in the heat. 
Also member Paul Ewing finished the outside sign with the new web address. 
Inside the building, member David Menges added some new items to the Elkhart Cemetery including new figures, a hearse and an interested bystander to the service. 
June 15th was our meeting night and several items were discussed including the new N-Scale layout with Tortoise Switch Machines installation starting. The clubs private group will be moving from Yahoo Groups to IO and more news on the March 16, 2019 Elkhart Model Railroad Club Train Show. It looks like we have a beautiful building wrapped up with plenty of room in Nappanee, Indiana. More news to come as we get closer to finalizing the deal. Some interesting trains show up at the club. 
Union Pacific’s Locomotive No. 1943, The Spirit, is the 16th commemorative locomotive introduced in the 155-year-old company’s history. The Spirit honors the United States’ armed forces and the men and women filling their ranks. Created in collaboration with Union Pacific veterans, the locomotive illustrates the railroad’s connection to the thousands of veterans who helped build America through the centuries.
The Moniker; A Boeing B-17 was christened the Spirit of the Union Pacific in 1943, recognizing employees who funded it through war bond contributions. The Spirit of the Union Pacific was assigned to the 571st Bomber Squadron and shot down on its fifth mission during a raid on enemy installations in Munster, Germany.
Honoring the Armed Forces; Every detail in The Spirit’s trade dress incorporates a piece of each U.S. armed forces branch. The Spirit’s front is symbolic of Air Force Silver, and the blue stripe is a reflection of the former Strategic Air Command’s “nose sash.” The lettering inside the sash is the original handdrawn font used on the B-17. It is followed by the Coast Guard’s “Racing Stripe” and the Navy’s Battleship Gray, which frames Union Pacific’s traditional American flag. The military camouflage is a nod to the Army and Marines. As the train passes by, the final message on the tail is dedicated to U.S. prisoners of war and those missing in action, featuring the POW/MIA symbol and its motto, You Are Not Forgotten.
We have lots of locomotives and trains to show you so Click here to check out all the action from this week. As always click here for the latest weekly report on train shows and swap meets in the area (this is the latest list) courtesy of Grand River Valley Railroad Club in Wyoming, MI. Also here's an announcement on a great NMRA conference coming up on September 21st and 22nd in South Bend, IN. The presenters are well known in railroad modeling and include Jim Six who is modeling Sturgis Michigan and has an extensive blog at Railroad Model Hobbiest and Tom Johnson the creator of the Logansport and Indiana Northern Railroad. Registration information is at www.michiana-nmra.org. Here's a link to the flyer.
June 8, 2018
Also some BREAKING NEWS ( I always wanted to do that) a building may be lined up for the 2019 Elkhart Model Railroad Club Train Show. The building is in the Nappanee, Indiana area and has plenty of room for vendors and displays. There will be more news about the show after June's business meeting. As announced earlier the train show had to be cancelled in 2018 after 13 continuous years of shows, when the building we had it in was sold and a new building couldn't be lined up in time. One of the favorite nights of the month for members is open running at the club. The weather had been rainy all day so that chased a lot of members inside to run trains. 
We had some On30 running on the layout with a couple of Bachmann locomotives. It was very tight clearance in several areas for these small engines in On30 but extremely large engines in HO Scale to pass through. On30 uses the American O scale of 1/4" to the foot, (ratio 1:48) to operate trains on HO gauge (16.5 mm/0.65 in) track. In the United States modelling in On30 dates back to the 1950s, using HO gauge wheels and O Guage locomotive bodies. In 1998 Bachmann Industries introduced a model of a 2-6-0 steam locomotive in this scale for the Christmas village market. This model, being very inexpensive, was quickly adopted by modellers. Other manufacturers followed Bachmann into this market, and Bachmann also introduced a number of other models. The Clear Lake Lumber Co. engine is a Bachmann, pulling cars built and modified by member Paul Ewing. 
Also a Algoma Central Railway (ACR) FP9A #1750 locomotive showed up for a run through the layout. The Algoma Central Railway (reporting mark AC) is a railway in Northern Ontario that operates between Sault Ste. Marie and Hearst. It formerly also had a branch line to Michipicoten. The area served by the railway is sparsely populated, with few roads. The railway is well known for its Agawa Canyon tour train and also provides passenger train service along its entire route to canoeists, snowmobilers, cottagers and tourists accessing this wilderness recreation region. The railway has been around since 1899 and faces an uncertain future and operations could cease in July 2018. 
We have lots of footage to show you so Click here to check out all the action from this week. As always click here for the latest weekly report on train shows and swap meets in the area (this is the latest list) courtesy of Grand River Valley Railroad Club - Wyoming, MI. 
Also here's an announcement on a great NMRA conference coming up on September 21st and 22nd in South Bend, IN. The presenters are well known in railroad modeling and include Jim Six who is modeling Sturgis Michigan and has an extensive blog at Railroad Model Hobbiest and Tom Johnson the creator of the Logansport and Indiana Northern Railroad. Registration information is at www.michiana-nmra.org. Here's a link to the flyer. June 1, 2018
One of the more unusual trains that showed up at the club is a circus train pulled by B&O A/B locomotives. 
The train was a Walthers kit and member Charlie Yoakam bought the kit in the 1980's. It was a true 80's kit as the roofs were just pieces of wood. 
A new Amtrak engine made a showing. It’s an AEM-7. Used in the Northeast Corridor, SEPTA also used the unit. The AEM-7 is a twin-cab four-axle 7,000 hp (5.2 MW) B-B electric locomotive built by Electro-Motive Division (EMD) and ASEA between 1978 and 1988. The locomotive was a derivative of the Swedish SJ Rc4 designed for passenger service in the United States. 
The primary customer was Amtrak, which bought 54 for use on the Northeast Corridor and Keystone Corridor. Two commuter operators, MARC and SEPTA, also purchased locomotives, for a total of 65. It was in use from 1978-2016/17 and still remains in use till the new Siemens Chargers arrive. It's 936's maidan voyage so to work it in it's paired with the NS hazmat safety train locomotive. 
Norfolk Southern’s Operation Awareness & Response (OAR) program was launched in 2015 to cultivate and strengthen relationships with local first responders by providing classroom, web-based, and field training on hazardous materials t
ransportation, as well as information about rail operations.
The NS hazmat safety train is comprised of:
A 2,000-horsepower, 273-ton locomotive painted in honor of emergency responders with insignia recognizing police, fire, and emergency services
Two boxcars converted into classrooms, each capable of holding 30 people
Four styles of tank cars, including DOT-105, DOT-111, DOT-112, and DOT-117, to illustrate a variety of car valves and fittings
Two 89-foot flatcars designed to transport intermodal containers
We have lots of footage to show you so Click here to check out all the action from this week. As always click here for the latest weekly report on train shows and swap meets in the area (this is the latest list) courtesy of Grand River Valley Railroad Club - Wyoming, MI. Also here's an announcement on a great NMRA conference coming up on September 21st and 22nd in South Bend, IN. The presenters are well known in railroad modeling and include Jim Six who is modeling Sturgis Michigan and has an extensive blog at Railroad Model Hobbiest and Tom Johnson the creator of the Logansport and Indiana Northern Railroad. Registration information is at www.michiana-nmra.org. Here's a link to the flyer.