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The Cimarron Valley Model Railroad Club Welcome aboard. We are seventeen grown men, two grown women and one very patient teenager who meet in the old freight room of the Rock Island depot, which the railroad left behind when it shut down in 1980 and which the city now rents to us for a dollar a year and the promise that we will keep the roof from leaking. So far, so good. The club was founded in 1974 in a member's basement. We moved into the depot in 1986, and in the fall of that year we drove the first spike, which in HO scale is a tricky thing to do ceremonially. Thirteen years later the Cimarron & Western has about 190 feet of main line, four towns, a division yard, an engine terminal and a trestle over the Salt Fork that has been photographed for two magazines and one wedding. The C&W is what modelers call a freelanced line, our own design from the timetable down to the herald on the cab doors, which means nobody can write in and tell us we got the paint scheme wrong. We picture it as a busy little regional line in the middle 1950s, hauling wheat, cattle, oil field pipe and cotton, and swapping cars with the Santa Fe at Cimarron Junction and the Frisco at Tolliver. Steam is on its way out and the first-generation diesels are taking over, which gives us an excuse to run both. This page is kept by me, Gordon Soloman. I was a telegraph operator and dispatcher for 31 years, most of them on the Santa Fe, and I'm the fellow who sits at the dispatcher's desk on operating nights and makes everybody miserable with train orders. |
What's New in the Depot
 We went DCC! After two years of arguing, and I mean two years, the membership voted in March to retire the old cab control, with its toggle switches and its forty-some electrical blocks, and switch to Digital Command Control. Everything went over in August. Every engineer now has a walk-around throttle and runs his own train from end to end without asking anybody to flip a block. There are nine throttle plug-in panels around the fascia. We have 34 locomotives with decoders installed and about a dozen to go. Don Albright installed most of them at his kitchen table and says he never wants to see a soldering iron again. Red Hill is finished. The scenery crew wrapped up the big hill over the summer: plaster cloth over cardboard strips, ground foam, real dirt from Harold's back yard (sifted and baked), and about 600 homemade trees. Come see it. The little stock pond with the cows standing in it is Lorena's work, and she's rightly proud. Pictures: We have a good many snapshots of the layout, but none of us has a scanner yet. They're coming soon, I promise. In the meantime there's a track plan on the layout page drawn with the typewriter keys. |
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Operating Sessions Some clubs run trains in circles. We run a railroad. Once a month we hold an operating session, where every train has a job to do. Freight cars move by car cards and waybills, so a boxcar of flour has somewhere it's going and somebody who expects it. The yardmaster at Tolliver builds the trains. Local freights switch the industries in each town. The through trains, including our version of the Santa Fe's Texas Chief on the trackage rights, have to get over the road on time, and that is where I come in. Trains run on a timetable against a fast clock running four times real speed, so a four-hour session is a sixteen-hour railroad day. I sit in the dispatcher's office (a closet with a desk, a lamp, and a copy of the timetable) and issue train orders over the phone line strung along the layout, just like the real thing. Engineers copy them down and repeat them back. New members generally find this confusing for one session and addictive by the third. Sessions are the second Saturday of the month, 1:00 to 5:00. Coming up: October 9, November 13 and December 11. Visitors are welcome to watch, and if you know a little about railroading we will likely hand you a throttle. |
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Holiday Open House Two weekends this year: Saturday and Sunday, November 27 and 28, and Saturday and Sunday, December 4 and 5, 1:00 to 5:00 each day. Free admission. We'll have the whole railroad running, the Christmas lights up on the depot, and the kids' loop going in the waiting room, where young engineers can push the button and run the train themselves. Donations go to the depot restoration fund. Last year we had over 1,400 visitors and put a new coat of paint on the waiting room with the proceeds. This year it's the platform lights. |
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Joining the Club Work nights are every Wednesday, 7:00 to 10:00. That's when the building, wiring and scenery get done, and it's the best time to come by and meet us. You don't need to know anything. Several of our best members didn't know which end of a soldering iron was hot when they started.
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Passengers carried since this page went up in May 1998:   
Questions, or want to come run a train? Send a message down the line: [email protected] Last updated Monday, September 13, 1999 · © 1999 Cimarron Valley Model Railroad Club |