Northern Utah

NORTHERN UTAH DIVISION

On May 9th, seven stalwart souls from the Northern Utah Division journeyed to Union Station in Ogden for what used to be National Train Day.  It was called the Heritage Festival this year.

The drive up, in a torrential downpour, was absolutely wonderful (tongue -in-cheek there) and we envisioned rather poor attendance due to this weather.  We were not a bit surprised that our day started slowly.  We were, however, very surprised at how rapidly the attendance grew.  The day turned out to be quite successful from several points of view: capturing the interest of kids, advertising and promoting the NMRA viewpoint.

I have stressed to everyone that we must interest young people in our hobby if it is to survive.  At this session one of our board members, Blaine Holbrook, developed and executed an idea to do just that.  Blaine combined the fun that young people have with the “Pinewood Derby” with model railroading.

He created a beautiful piece of equipment with flex track mounted in 3 parallel “rights of way.”  One end was elevated and had pins to simultaneously start the cars.  Before taking a car to the track, the participant was required to assemble the car.  Mainly, the trucks needed to be affixed which gave the youngster some hands-on work.  What interest there was in this project!  I don’t think that the line let up all day long.

The really rewarding feature of the activity was to watch many of the participants migrate to the “Timesaver Modules” that Fred Baney and Geoff Carter brought.  It was a natural progression from playing trains to operating trains!