The second phase continued on around toward Lyons, termi-
nating at Shelburn.
“Then the major phase started from that, which was continu-
ing on past Shelburn, into Lyons, on into East Lyons, and then
around the corner to Mill City, and around to Gates. So Mill City
was a lot of the second phase.
“Now we have started to finish this last quarter of the space,
which is phase 3. We anticipate we will have this running in
about 6 to 8 months.
“Our goal is to have the whole railroad running for the NMRA
national convention in Portland in 2015. We have actually
been able to exceed our expectations, partly because we have
a very reasonable general manager as far as construction who
gives us deadlines we can meet.
“And, we’ve got a really good group of people working here.
There are seven or eight crews. The members get to choose
which crew they want to be on. Each crew has a foreman. The
foreman is responsible for the overall progress and success for
that particular group. There has been turnover, but new people
stepped up as others departed.”
MRH:
“Guys, you have what I would call floating staging. In
fact, you have it named the USS Granite Mountain right now,
and there was a USS Lyons on it previously. How does it work?”
Rick:
“Well, we got into a dilemma: How do we operate? We
hadn’t been operating for nearly five years and we were get-
ting operating withdrawal. We were able to go to a lot of other
layouts and operate, but there were a lot of guys who were
getting the twitches.
“We were trying to figure out – we can’t really build the whole
layout at once, because that’s going to take a long time. We did
