The Kingdom of Philtopia

A month ago I went to the open house for the Greater Niagara model railroad engineer’s to checkout what their club was about. I enjoyed the visit, they had a wonderful layout and I took lots of pictures and a couple videos. I decided to continue visiting the club and hopefully eventually become a member. So 1 month later I have been to 3 members nights and have run a few of their trains and it has been a lot of fun.

The layout itself is era’d between 1955 and 1965 so unfortunately it is not by default a layout Chessie would make sense, around a decade too early BUT I was still able to get permission after an operating session to run my trains for a bit. This sounded like the perfect first outing for my Atlas U30B. This is a DC model from the silver series and it is exceptionally detailed and it runs very smooth. I also decided to give my Bachmann GP7 a run with the U30B as it hasn’t ever seen anything but EZ track beneath its wheels.

The Fenwick Central is a DC layout broken into several blocks for 4 throttles, it is a very well designed block system and multiple trains are able to run simultaneously through proper communication and passing siding usage. Now you may recall from my original post about my GP7 that is a DCC and it is however Bachmann puts dual mode decoders into its engines so that it can run both! FYI the GP7 ran excellent as DC and it also paired very nicely with the Atlas there wasn’t any tugging or dragging once the engines were moving.

So I had the cats running on the layout and I did 2 full trips around which took around 10-15minutes. Below is a video featuring Fenwick Central trains at first then it ends with my Chessie System run.

Enjoy

direct link to video