David:
“The majority of rolling stock belongs to the club. Either
purchased by the club, or donated to the club by members.
There are a few member cars running around. It would be kind
of a chore to try to find them – but those specifically have met
the standards and are accepted by the car foreman.
“They’ve been tested out and everything – rolling ability,
wheels, couplers, everything is tested before it’s allowed on
the layout. And it must be within era. You’re not going to see
any drop deck trailer loads here. That kind of thing, you won’t
see them on the railroad, because you would not have seen
them in 1979.”
Columbia Cascade and Western - 14
17
17: A well-used Alco road switcher is usually part of the
power set on the Tallman, Sweet Home or Woodburn
locals. Because of grades, almost all trains need two
locomotives and some hot through trains will get three.
MRH:
“Car standards. What are they?”
David:
“They’re based on car standards from the La Mesa club.
One of our members came from that group. We had the good
fortune of the car foreman of the La Mesa club attending a
small meet that was held up here,and some of us were able to
attend that. That man has forgotten more than I will ever know
about standards.
“Basically a standard car has just a little bit more than the stan-
dard NMRA weight. We’ve found that going a little heavier is
better. We have a limit on the train length of 25 cars maximum,
so our motive power has been matched to that.
“We standardize on the Kadee #5, mostly because of all the
cars we already had, had 5s on them. Metal wheels, that’s
a track cleaning issue. All cars have to have metal wheels. So
we’ve developed our own standards.”
Rick:
“For example, if you have a 50-foot boxcar, you have 5
ounces plus or minus 1/4 ounce. It just goes up incrementally.
60-foot, 6 ounces plus or minus half an ounce. The difficult
ones to put weight in are the open auto racks. We managed to
do it – the enclosed ones are easy – the open ones were a bit
hard. But we did it.”
MRH:
“The club runs DCC. What system are you using?”
Rick:
“We’re running NCE – we switched over from DC to
DCC in about 2002. One of the members did some extensive
research on what was available at the time. It was Digitrax,
NCE, and Easy DCC, and I don’t remember what some of the
other systems were – but his opinion was that he felt NCE was
the best and the most reliable. So we put it to a vote of the
membership, and we voted to have NCE.
MRH-Feb 2013
