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.
