Club Layout Teardown ....Long Story , Medium Length

[teejay]

The MRR Club I belonged to started about 2000 and was modular in style . When I got there in about '03 , the 2' X 4' modules featured 3 main line tracks which didn't offer much room for scenery and was , frankly , pretty boring . There was talk about going to Free-Mo style but the head honchos ended up with plans for a permanent layout . The area we rented was the large furnace room of an industrial building ( first pharmaceuticals and then it was a market ). Rent was cheap because there was much cleanup to be done as well as painting the walls . It became livable .

A large permanent layout design was made ...about 500 running feet , single main line with several branches . Committees were established , basic construction , track laying , scenery and structures etc. The first two tasks were done over about 2 years , hand laid track , hand made turnouts etc......all nicely done . I was out of town with work at this point but came back in time for the scenery and structures part of it . Little had been done about that so I dove into it with the help of about 4 or 5 others and away we went . Within about 18 months we had much of it looking good . I had to leave again for a couple of years and nobody carried on with the rest of the scenery but that's how it can go in a club ...32 guys and maybe 10 do any of the necessary work .

I was just notified the other day that the building has been sold and the new owner wants the furnace room cleared out by Dec 31 . So I went down to snap a few pics for memories . The clean out will be huge and all scenery will be destroyed because nothing was designed to come apart . I guess the head honchos of the club thought it would be there forever . Pretty sad !








Looks like I'll have to reduce the size of all the pics I wanted to post ...may take a while !