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The Bristol S Gauge Railroaders are dedicated to S scale (1/64 scale) model railroading. Formed in 1948, we believe we are the longest running S scale club in America!
Members are interested in most branches of S scale, including, but not limited to, Scale, Narrow Gauge (Sn3 and Sn2), Hi-Rail, and American Flyer operating and collecting. Our major goals are to learn from each other and have fun doing it.
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The September 11 meeting will be at Tommy Robichaud's. If you need directions, contact our secretary Dick Connors at flyingyankee1@verizon.net.
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The club picnic/barbeque at Bobbie and Ed Stead's was a fantastic time! Pictures here.
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Congratulations Scott! Pictures from Scott's graduation here!
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The May meeting was Saturday, May 15th, at Donna and Joe Santoro's in Wolfeboro. This was an exceptional meeting, pictures here! Pictures of Joe's layout here.
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The Greenberg show March 27 and 28th, at the Shriner's in Wilmington, went very well as usual. I was on winter vacation in Phoenix and missed the show (bummer!), but I will be happy to post any thoughts or pictures you might have of the show.
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March 20th we met at the home of Pat and John Fucile. Pat and John are both avid modelers, and have built an excellent hi-rail empire! Weather was gorgeous that day, and those lucky enough to attend (15 members and 1 guest) had an excellent time! Click the photo for more pictures. (Dick Connors sent along several pictures, which have now been posted).
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We had a fine meeting Saturday, February 20, at Richard Haley's house. There were about 24 members, and the joint was jumping! Richard made briskett of beef with his special sauce, and chilli, along with the usual munchies. We also had fun playing with his floor layout. Click the photo above for more pictures.
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Another Amherst Railroad Society Show is now history! This is the biggest show in the Northeast, and is especially fun for us because we have our own "S scale" section where several S dealers and manufacturers are all together. This allows lots of catching up with old friends, and is the highlight of the show weekend for me! The show attendance was the best in the last 4 years, with 21,458 people attending!
The Bristol Club also had a Great show! Think we may have set a record for coal dumped and smoke generated this time! Tommy Robichaud brought his Big Boy and it generated lots of interest at its' first outing. This was also the first show for out new TMCC system, donated by Doug Peck. We set up TMCC on the outer loop, and had DCC running on the inner loop and yards as usual. The TMCC system and Big Boy worked flawlessly, and generated a lot of interest (and smoke). The Big Boy also did a little landscaping, making one of the stone cuts a little wider than it had been. I think many of us were happy to see AC return to the layout after many years absence!
On the DCC loop, the coal dump and camera car/TV continued to catch the crowd's interest. Tommy also brought his circus train pulled by an AM Northern with a souped up smoke unit. At one point during the Big Boy/Northern National Smoke-off (unofficially won by the Northern) our end of the Young Building was enveloped in a smoky haze. It was a blast! Throughout the weekend the club members were out in force, and we had great set-up and tear-down crews and wonderful help all during the show. Phyllis Sieger and Bobbie Stead did a great job scheduling everyone so we all got to both work and play. All-in-all a dynamite weekend!
Click here for more pictures. If anyone else took any pictures please send them in for posting!
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We met Saturday, January 9, at Chet Brown's house for our regular meeting. As always, the food was great at Jan and Chet's, I especially liked the pulled pork! Chet has a large layout featuring DCC for us to play with. He is currently making some improvements, but he had two trains running continuously, one pulled by a B&M F7 consist, the other featuring a Pacific with smoke and sound. Chet's layout has lots of detail, so it repays a careful study! Click on the picture above to see some photos of Chet's layout. We had 28 members present, including a brand new member, Deane Louise Greene! It was an excellent meeting, with a lot of time spent in the train room, great railroad oriented conversations, and a spirited business meeting. Thanks, Jan and Chet!
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The Greenberg show at the Shriner's in Wilmington went very well. We tested out our new DCC throttles with duplex radio. All returns aren't in yet, but at least one throttle worked flawlessly. The other tested ok, but had some problems during actual operation. We'll continue testing at the HUB show.
Jim Babish took a stop motion video of setup at Greenberg. We did some testing with various video formats. People seemed to be having trouble with the Quicktime and MP4 versions, so he sent two more, AVI and WMV. I asked everyone to try the various formats, and let me know which is best for us to use. It looks like the best solution is the MP4 format. This is the format we will be using for all videos, including some archive videos that Jim is working on now.
Here is the link to the video: Greenberg Setup MP4 (13MB)
If you click on the link and it will not run, you can download a very good, eay to install and use, FREE Player: AVS Media Player
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We had a great time at the club Christmas meeting! Pat and John Ciarleglio put on a dynamite spread and I think that everyone had a fine time. We had our traditional Yankee swap, which was a lot of un. John's new layout is coming along well and we ran several trains, including the Flying Yankee. It's currently point-to-point, so it was critical to stop the train before running off the table! Fortunately, there were no major mishaps.Its coming along well, and will be a dynamite layout!
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The Bedford Boomers Show is now a memory. We had a slight delay in setting up due to some recent changes on the layout, but eventually all was ready when the show began. Thanks very much to the small crew who helped setup and tear down at the event. I understand Michael Greene's assistance on Sunday morning was truly appreciated. This was an all layout event, no vendors at this show. We had interest from other clubs in our coal dump operation. Also the kids really enjoyed seeing Thomas the Train running around the layout with the big trains
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The October club meeting was held at Rob and Phyllis Siegers' home.They had completed a tremendous amount of scenery work on their layout. To help us find some of more interesting aspects of the layout, the Siegers gave everyone a short sort of treasure hunt list of questions. To answer the questions you had to search around the layout. Some of the questions wanted you to find out what was going on at the swamp area, determine which type of donuts the police force ate, and how many dogs were scattered around the layout. A fun way to get people to really see all the little details that had been added to this layout. There were prizes for the club members who got the correct answers too. Just like last year, we enjoyed some really good food, from hot cider to delicious desserts. Here are a few photos of the layout. Click on an image to see it larger.
The pumpkin patch at the farm. |
Another house being built. |
Maine Central passing thru. |
Makin' a batch of moonshine at the still behind the barn area. |
Guys working the cranberry bogs. |
What's happening at the swamp? |
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Our First show of the season, the Newmarket Heritage Festival is over. We had great weather on Saturday and despite showers on Sunday, had good attendance. Our location at the American Legion Hall is a perfect venue to setup and run trains. Thank you to our hosts for allowing us to use this facility. Since it rained on Sunday, we shared the hall with several musical acts who had originally been scheduled outside at the Waterfront area.
The local newspaper, Fosters Daily Democrat, featured our layout in its write-up about the Sunday Festival events. Go to this link to view full article: http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090928/GJNEWS_01/709289965.
We had a wonderful military train set running on our layout at the Newmarket show. A series of flat cars had been meticulously loaded with military tanks, jeeps and other military gear. These cars had been donated by club member, Dan Lundy, who passed away in August this year. These cars were just a small portion of the trains and freight donated by Dan. We truly appreciate his generous donation and will miss him. Other donated items will appear at shows later in the year.
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September started our club season and what better way to start it than at the home of club President, Tommy Robichaud. He suggested a Western theme for this year's club meeting.
It was a surprise to see our club members had so many different western hats. Of the 25 or so I saw at the meeting, not one of them was alike! Tommy's now famous chili was a key feature of the food provided for the club meeting and by mid afternoon all of the chili had been eaten. Click Here to see Photos some club members in their Western gear at the meeting.
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Review the Club's Summer Picnic by clicking here.
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If you are interested in joining the Bristol club, please contact our Club Secretary, Dick Connors at flyingyankee1@verizon.net.
Click the buttons at top of the page to see our schedule, projects, photos of our layouts and other club information.
Copyright © 2005-2009 Bristol S Gauge Railroaders, Inc. All Images, Information and Design on this website is owned by Bristol S Gauge Railroaders, Inc.or its members. Any copying, reproduction and/or distribution of any graphics and/or text information is strictly prohibited by law, unless permission in writing is granted by Bristol S Gauge Railroaders, Inc.
