Visit to the North Shore Model Railroad Club

The Hudson Berkshire Division of the NMRA took a but tour recently to the North Shore Model Railroad Club. They are an HO and HOn3 club located in Wakefield, Massachusetts, about 15 minutes north of Boston. Founded in 1977, their layout it about 40' x 95' in total.  They call it the "Chesapeake System", which is a fictitious railroad based on the 'merger' of the Chesapeake and Lake Erie, the Cumberland Western and the Chesapeake and Hudson railroads. The layout is set in the Virginia/West Virginia area of the US, set in the 1950's. Operations include 'classic' operations where trains of the 1950's are run, and 'modern' ops where trains and freight from the 1980's-2000's are run.

They opened their club up especially for our group and had several trains running during the hours we were there. Like many other clubs that are multiple-decades old (the former RPI layout in Troy NY comes to mind) there was a mix of old and new; tired and fresh; hand laid and flextrack; standard and narrow gauge; sound equipped and barely DC; etc. 

I will let the pictures do the talking:

Here is an interesting shot. I asked the guy running the Amtrak-led train to stop on the bridge so I could take a picture without the train blurring. He graciously complied, and as he did so an opposing train split the switch on the other side of the bridge and came down the track towards the stopped train. Had it not stopped for my photo, they would have collided on the bridge (with perhaps disastrous results). In this shot the offending train has backed up several feet already. 

And here are shots of what it takes to make it work (including some proto operations paperwork and job assignments):

It was a fun trip.