Updated
October 23, 2009
Club Info
Western New York
Trainmasters was formed over 18 years ago, sometime in
the late 1980's perhaps. The original founding members
are no longer involved in the organization, so there's
little information available about our history.
Isabell - The Early
Years
Isabell Street, Buffalo,
New York happens to have once housed what could have
become one of the greatest of model railroading feats in
the Western New York area. It's hard to say what
the actual square footage was, but it was
tremendous.
Our club layout was
located in an industrial building, in a rented
room. Just finding your way to it made you feel
like you were walking into a trap in some sort of horror
movie, but once in the club confines it was a model
railroaders bliss. The double track mainline
snaked back and forth and then again, over and under
with not one, but two hidden staging yards. It also had
a stub classification yard that had a throat thicker
than a typical NFL linebacker.
The room itself had a
lounge, work area and even a tower! The view was
spectacular. Thinking back, we had not even began
to fathom what it would take to wire that beast of a
layout up, well before the days of our DCC
venture. We did successfully get enough wire
around to have one successful trip around the
mainline.
We'd had meetings upon
meetings with a committee set up just to backtrack into
coming up with some kind of operation plan. There
was also a secondary mainline that ran above and
behind. One day it all clicked and we realized
that we had an incredible operating potential with a
loads out - empties in coal mine/power plant and even an
sizeable intermodal yard. Having the two hidden
yards would allow us to run the layout like a real life
operation. It was something that no one individual
would be able to complete in a lifetime. It was
what you would join a club for, that's for sure.
It seems like only days
went by since our golden spike ceremony that we had our
second break-in. The facility was not secure, and
it was becoming unsafe to be there in that
building. Shortly after, the dream layout was
dismantled. It was a very sad day back in about
1997. Fortunately, one of our members had the
space to store most of the benchwork and supplies.
It all stayed there for quite some time until we finally
found a new location.
Victoria Square - The
Lackawanna 600
600 square feet was all
the room we could afford. It paled in comparison
to the enormity of was we had been blessed with
previously. The location was much more secure and
even had it's own bathroom facility. It had a parking
lot right outside the door, a well lit entranceway and
was place you could invite someone to visit without
worry. It was sometime about 1998 and
construction was well under way the following year.
Once the demolition of
walls to open up the space and other construction was
completed we started fresh with resurrected pieces of
benchwork. The layout had been more carefully
planned this time, using Cadrail. It had a single
track main with passing tracks and hidden staging that
connected the two yards at the ends of the mainline. It
also had the loads-in, empties-out coal
operation.
The trackwork seemed to
take forever. The wiring was quite a chore, even
though we were now using DCC. The PM4's were a
handy module that we used to control the automatic
reversing circuit. Boy, that thing worked
nice. We got the layout running and even got some
scenery started. Things were really starting to take
shape.
Rented rooms are not the
best places for permanent layouts, as we found
out. After extending our original three year lease
an extra year we were forced into a decision. The
rent was going up and we could barely afford it as it
was. During our stay there, we had become a club
that spent more of our energy running train shows to
afford the rent than we did enjoying the club
layout. It was destruction time again, and this
time it really hurt.
Present Day - Round
Robin Blues
The club membership
definitely dwindled because of our second move. We
had had quite a few awesome people become members during
those great years that we had a permanent
location. It's harder to keep interest in a club,
and to pay dues, etc. if you don't have a permanent
meeting place where you can enjoy trains.
Fortunately, a few of us
stuck together, as we have been friends for so many
years. In late 2005 we decided to try our hand at a
modular layout. It would be a great way to work on
a project together, and it would also give us a much
needed display layout for our shows.
All of our current
members either have, or have had a layout at home.
Having round-robin meetings was a great way for us to
keep together and plan for our modular layout. The
pages of this website will tell you how far we've
progressed.
Thank you for
reading this very condensed version of our club's
history. There are days and days worth of stories
to be told of our clubs adventures that couldn't be
written here. We hope to share them with you
firsthand in the coming days.
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Old
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