Both tetters and green_elite_cab have written about the model railroad clubs to which they belong. I figured that I will take a few moments and extend an open invitation to all of our Big Blue members who may be thinking about heading to Florida for vacation ...

For anyone vacationing in the Ft. Myers, Florida area ...

The Scale Rails of Southwest Florida Model Railroad Club is open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 10 AM until 2 PM. We welcome visitors and enjoy the opportunity to talk about model railroading in general and our relatively large club layout in particular and there will always be someone happy to give visitors a personal layout tour.



We also have a Modular N scale layout, currently set up in a separate room, which does travel to train shows …




… as well as an HO layout with Thomas the Tank Engine and other brightly colored trains for the enjoyment of the younger visitors who sometimes arrive with Mom and Dad …



A couple of our members host a once monthly evening gathering at “The Depot” for Scouts, many of whom earn their Model Railroading Merit Badge through the program at the Club. One program had Cub Scouts build modules …




The Scale Rails Club is a 100% NMRA Club; all members are first NMRA members. The NMRA’s Achievement Program is alive and well at Scale Rails, with many members working towards one Achievement Award or another. Many of the Clubs members have participated as clinic presenters at NMRA-sanctioned events. Each spring, our members put on a series of clinics, open to the public, at The Depot. Each Saturday morning from January through April, there is a clinic presented on such diverse topics as proper soldering of electrical connections, building trees, locomotive weathering and scratch-building structures in styrene. We are blessed with a talented group of modelers, quite a few of whom are “snowbirds,” escaping the cold winter weather for the winter, only to “fly back up North” after Easter.

On our layout, every attempt is being made to model locations as they actually are in the prototype world. Of course, there is some selective compression used, but for major “signature scenes,” e.g., the downtown business district of Victorville, CA, a small group of modelers is working directly from photographs to "get it right." The San Bernardino Santa Fe Depot, built by one of two of the Club’s NMRA Master Model Railroaders is a very large and impressive structure, build without the benefit of selective compression over a two year period.

Santa Fe’s San Bernardino Depot on Division 1 (Upper Level)




We model the time period 1950 to 1969, and trains can be seen pulled by both big Santa Fe steam and diesels from several roads. Division 1 (Santa Fe and Union Pacific) trackage runs (on the upper level) between San Bernardino and Victorville, California through the high desert.

"The Joint Line" (Denver, Rio Grande and Western, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, Union Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe) runs between Denver and Pueblo, Colorado on the lower level.


The Rock Island enters the modeled portion of the route from hidden staging just east of Colorado Springs and has an interchange point there.

Between Colorado Springs and an area west of Castle Rock you will find the narrow gauge trackage. The slim gauge enthusiasts among us are always busy making improvements to their part of the facility, whether it be adding a new mine and re-aligning trackage to service it or adding a turntable at their eastern terminus near Colorado Springs.

The two levels are connected by a helix, which is lined with optical sensors that light LEDs on a fascia-mounted board indicating “progress towards Victorville, CA or Pueblo, CO, both cities existing as staging tracks on the very bottom or third level accessed by the helix. The board with the route diagram and the string of LEDs indicating the cities along the route is a helpful tool when during an operation session, you might be the engineer on Train #1, “The Royal Gorge,” leaving Chicago at 5:00 AM on it’s trip west, and you need to know where your train is and when to expect to see it appear on the modeled portion of the route just east of Pueblo, CO, on the lower level. Once it appears, the first stop is Pueblo and then on to Denver, arriving at noon, and then departing at 12:45 PM for the trip back east to Chicago as Train #2. Trains bound for San Bernardino come off the helix from staging just east of Victorville for their trip west.

We have just recently initiated an operations plan utilizing twenty-two passenger trains, identified by their prototype name and number, and running according to the prototype's schedule against a 10:1 fast clock. It can get pretty interesting! Jobs are assigned for Dispatcher (2), Tower Operators (4), Yard Masters (up to 4) and engineers (one for each passenger train.) A good time is generally had by all, and a record of hours spent at each job is kept to apply to the appropriate Achievement Award.

A group of several members have now volunteered to begin development of a similar operating scheme for freight service, which will be "folded into" the new passenger service schedule next Fall, after any unforeseen glitches have been ironed out of the passenger schedule.

Control on the layout is totally Digitrax utilizing a combination of UT4R and DT402R throttles. Power to the layout is handled by a DSC 100 and three DB 100s. All of the sensing and Block occupancy circuitry and “indication boards” have been developed by our resident Electrical Engineer. He is behind all things electronic and is always developing new “high-tech circuitry” to provide some additional beneficial nuance to the operation of the layout, like the new “Short Circuit Location Indicator Boards” now mounted at the Pueblo, CO and Castle Rock, CO Tower Operator positions.

Motive power and rolling stock used on the layout is a combination of Club-Owned and “Long Term Leased” equipment owned by individual members. All rolling stock whether Club-Owned or “Leased” must conform to NMRA standards and have metal wheels. Checking to insure Conformance to Standards as well as insuring clean metal wheel treads has become pretty much a full-time job for one of our dedicated members. He also takes care of “Bad Order” cars and maintains the rolling stock roster listing (now at several hundred cars.)

There are lots of pictures on the club's Web site, many taken during benchwork construction, track laying and wiring, up to the current state of the layout ... starting with the bare room … take a look … and while you’re at it, click on the “Video Gallery” button on the club web site.

... and should you find yourself in the Ft. Myers, Florida vicinity, stop in for a warm welcome and the “Cooke’s Tour” of our Layout!

Comments welcome!

That model of the San Bernardino Station is impressive!!! Did you guys model Cajon Pass, and how much did you need to compress it to fit?

How did I miss this thread?

Woah, large building with lots of space, that's nice! Plenty of room for the Scouts, and other activities, a huge plus. biL, if I ever get to Florida, I will definitely stop by to see you and visit the club. Our organization does hold occasional regional seminars in the Tampa Bay/Clearwater Beach area, maybe I can go to the next one. So how far are y'all from Tampa?

Must echo the comments from Russ, the station is fabulous and huge too. Wow!

Thanks for sharing this.

To clarify my earlier description of what’s powering the layout, a little homework has revealed that the Command Station cabinet for the layout has a DCS100 command station, and three DB150 boosters. Four Model Fuel Tanks from Loy's Toys act as the power supplies for each of the units. As you can see from the photographs, the command station also has air filters and fans to keep the heat sinks cool. The layout has 14 PM42 power management units to establish smaller power districts and for control in automatic reversing sections.





O.K. … with that out of the way … now to answer Russ’s query re: Cajon Pass …

As I’m not at all familiar with it, being an abject novice on the subject of the Santa Fe, its routes and geography, the Cajon Pass area, between Cajon and Summit is an area that takes up the entire end of the aisle that portrays the track from east of San Bernardino, through Cajon, Cajon Pass, Summit and then through the high desert to Victorville. Until I can take a few photos of the actual area, the following images, borrowed from the Club’s web site, taken during layout construction will have to suffice …

Construction in the area of Sullivan's Curve and the climb to Cajon Pass ...


Scenery begins to take shape at Sullivan's Curve ...


Mormon Rocks ...


… and this early shot of the approach to Summit from the Cajon Pass …


And to answer Gary’s question … the Fort Myers area is about 2 to 2½ hours south of Tampa, around 150 miles or so down I-75, depending on where you are in Tampa, a little bit more than a cross-town drive! Florida is an interminably long state … not all that wide but very long!!
(And the club is actually in North Ft. Myers, but who’s quibbling.)

And just for the curious, San Bernardino Depot is between three-and-a-half and four feet long (I haven’t crawled up on the upper level to measure, nor had I thought to ask the builder.) It is pretty cool, though, to hit F1 on the throttle approaching the Depot’s long platform, turning on the bell, and slowly bring your train to a halt there along the platform in San Bernardino. It should be more impressive when the neighborhood around the depot is finally populated with the small houses and bungalows that several of us are scratch building!

[I have much to learn about the Santa Fe! Everything about it is very, very different from the good old Reading Company, with which I am so intimately familiar!]

Is all of Cajon pass on the upper level? I would have thought that San Bernardino would have been on the lower level with Cajon Pass being used to reach the upper level and from Summit on being on the upper level.

Russ Bellinis Wrote:Is all of Cajon pass on the upper level? I would have thought that San Bernardino would have been on the lower level with Cajon Pass being used to reach the upper level and from Summit on being on the upper level.

Russ, it's been a long time since I lived in California - 27 years. When I did live in the "southern part of the state," it was in Redondo Beach. I never made it over to San Bernardino, Cajon Pass or Victorville. I do have much to learn about the Santa Fe ... I have spent my modeling years avoiding it like the Plague! [I traded, as an even trade, a brand new AHM brass Pacific that was a Christmas gift from owner of the hobby shop I was managing for a vintage, 1948 brass and Zamac Reading G1sa Pacific that was in pieces!!] But I just spent about an hour and 10 minutes on Google Earth checking out the BNSF route from San Bernardino through Cajon Pass to Victorville as a little background homework prior replying to your question. Again, I'm no expert! But, here goes.

Our Club's Upper Level (called Division 1) goes from LA (in staging) to San Bernardino, where there is the roundhouse, turntable, diesel house, servicing for both types of motive power, a five track yard (about six or seven feet long) and the San Bernardino Depot (which has four tracks. Trackage then heads east (north) through Cajon and then climbs through Sullivan’s Curve and Cajon Pass to Summit, where there is a “pocket” for Helpers. From there, the track continues on to Victorville. Based on what I learned during my short fact-finding mission, that is the route followed by the prototype.

Beyond Victorville, trains continue east towards La Junta or Denver and points east to Chicago using the helix and exiting at the Lower Level (The Joint Line) to travel to Denver, or continuing down the helix to the very bottom level, containing four (or five, I can’t remember) tracks for staging, each one long enough to hold two complete staged trains. Their locations are managed utilizing optical sensors, as the only way to physically watch your train on that level is to sit on the floor and scrunch down. The optical sensors work extremely well. They are also installed at intervals along the helix and each one lights an LED on a panel mounted on the fascia, which is labeled as one of the cities or towns along the route to Chicago, so you can tell when you are approaching your final destination down through the helix and into staging by watching the LED's light in progression.

I am unsure why you expected the route that you described … but as Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it is …”