The first meeting of 1999 (11th of Jan.) started off with an election of two officers as required by our By-Laws. Marshall Long planned to leave the state by the end of June, so he resigned as president of the club. Dennis Valis resigned his position, but then applied for re-election. This created two vacancies, as required, and one candidate, so I submitted my name as the second candidate. Dennis and I were then voted in as the new train crew members and Dennis was later designated as president of the club in accordance with the By-Laws as written. This meeting also saw the second reading of an amendment to the By-Laws concerning the movement of modules within the club and the specific rights of the module owners. That amendment was finally approved and adopted by the membership at the February meeting.
SAMRA was the guest of SANTRAK on the night of 8 January 1999 for the purpose of holding their monthly meeting. During that evening, they invited us to display a layout at their February Jamboree, but they asked us to do it without compensation. This caused some spirited discussions at our own business meeting the following Sunday, but we eventually put up one of our largest displays ever because it was to be one of Marshall’s last shows in this area. The layout was a pit type oval that measured 16 feet by 36 feet and contained 24 modules. This included four battleship corners, four 6 foot modules and both of the automated mountain division loops, plus Gary Rouse’s yard complex. It was a very popular layout and drew a large crowd, but it was also a lot of work.
For the New Braunfels show in April, we displayed our Kellerman’s Junction module for the first time ever. This allowed us to set up a branch line that extended over to the Austin Club layout. We had tried a similar connection at the AMRE show in October of 1998 by going out the back of Gary’s yard, but the curves within the yard caused some problems with long trains. The layout for this show permitted us to swap a couple of trains back and forth between their DCC throttle and our analog throttle, but we soon realized we still have some fine tuning to do before this idea would really work. Our layout was an “L” shape with Kellerman’s Junction in place of the usual 3 foot corner. Gary Rouse’s yard complex extended to the inside of the layout.
The members of SANTRAK have never given much thought to family socializing, but this changed on 1 May 1999. After several weeks of planning, a group of us ( including wives and children) went up to Cedar Park for a ride on the Austin Steam Train. We were very fortunate in our timing because the locomotive was pulled out of service about three weeks after our trip. The maintenance crew found some cracks in one of the cylinder castings. They estimate about a year for fund raising and eventual repair.
Frolin Marek’s show on 5 June 1999 allowed us to use the same basic configuration as was used for the New Braunfels show except that the branch line between layouts had an extra four feet. Austin now has an adapter module that allows them to come out or go in on any one of the three Ntrak lines.
This practice of connecting between club layouts has been an experimental exercise to learn about the possible problems of running trains between different control systems. It has allowed the club members of both clubs to work much closer together and it has allowed the SANTRAK members to learn more about the DCC system that is used by the Austin Group. This new interest in DCC soon inspired Johnny Seguin to bring in an MRC Command 2000 system, along with a decoder equipped locomotive, for experimentation on the SANTRAK layout. I soon followed by ordering a couple of decoder equipped locomotives and we then began to sample DCC operations.