June Newsletter and Operations Invite | June 2023

Hello Manhattan Modeler,

First I have to get the most timely notification in because it is coming up very soon.

Tomorrow there is an Operation session on the West Island Model Railroad Club. It is located in Hicksville on the far Western side of Long Island.  Several MM members regularly operate on this very large layout already. It does require a pretty large group to operate it properly. Unfortunately neither Heath nor I can make it due to other commitments.

Here is the invite.

You and your crew are invited to the next operating session at the club will be on Sunday, June 4, 2023. Things have been moved back an hour to make it easier for more guys to attend. Doors are at 11am, job bids are at 11:30am, and the first scheduled train is at 12 noon.

We will be running our first WWE local from Wilkes-Barre to Palmerton and return. (It has nothing to do with wrestling, but it still should be fun.) A few other locals will run as well as the usual yard jobs, passenger trains, and through freights.

The WiFi throttles worked great during IslandOps, so we will be using them again. Now everyone can have a fully-functioning wireless throttle.

Please register on the operatingsessions.com website so we can plan out what jobs to prepare for the session. Here is the link to the session registration page: June 2023 session

We hope to see you on June 4th!

Jim Schweitzer

WI Ops Committee Chair

I was traveling for the month of May for work. Two days after our amazing visit to Phil Monet’s amazing layout in the Bronx, I went to Shanghai, China to install an art show at the Pudong Museum of Art. I have never traveled to China before so I did not realize that all Google apps and websites would be fully blocked. My plans to do a lot of email communication were completely scuttled and I am still working through a month’s worth of old emails.

I do travel a fair bit for work and try to find some local hobby shop or rail related things to do wherever I have off time. Shanghai is the first place that I was not able to find any hobby shops at all. The city and local businesses were hit very hard by the three separate Covid lockdowns they have gone through. I had four addresses of hobby shops and I completely struck out. Some of the buildings I had addresses for had even been demolished.

 I really learned the Shanghai subway system in my attempts. The Shanghai Metro is massive. 498 miles worth of track and 408 stations carrying 10 million passengers a day. To compare NYC subway has 248 miles of track, 424 stations carrying 6.3 million passengers a day.  Between stations Shanghai Metro trains average 50mph. Shanghai even has a subway station at Shanghai Disneyland.

Since most modern model trains are made in China I was sure that there would be some model train related thing I could find but no. China seems to not have much of a hobby history that would be familiar to the West. I did find many places selling Gundam Sci-fi robot kits as well as some Warhammer/Wargame model figures and those seemed very popular with young adults.

As far as prototype railroads. I was able to visit the Shanghai Railway Museum, rode some High Speed Trains (HSTs) and even got in a bit of railfanning. Here is a link to a video I made of railfanning outside the Shanghai Railway Station.

https://youtu.be/rpIJGiE6Dj0

China is in the midst of transitioning from traditional locomotive hauled passenger trains to Electric Multiple Unit HSTs. So it was fascinating to see this change-over happening with examples of both types of service still happening. In the last 20 years they have been rapidly switching to these new fast trains and are connecting the whole country with HSTs. One last abbreviation that I learned in China about trains. HFT stands for High Frequency Trains. These new HSTs were also HFTs because the schedule worked out to such frequent trains with service about once an hour even to fairly small cities. Between cities these trains reach over 200mph and I was able to go on a trip 600 miles from Shanghai to the mountains in 3 hours. The trip was fascinating because I could see just how quickly the rail development was happening. Most of the first HST rail corridors were east/west but I could see that new currently under construction rails, tunnels and viaducts were going in north/south. I saw several stations that had open tracks at one level east/west and there was an under-construction Viaduct that will intersect the station on an upper level so passengers can change train routes at a different platform.

One of the more interesting HSTs that I was able to see was the so called “Golden Dragon” a special train intended for service in extreme weather conditions. It is made to work in harsh weather conditions like desert sandstorms and even cold high-altitude climates like in the Himalayas. For high altitude service each seat has oxygen masks like on and airplane. Like a real life trains from the Sci-fi movie “Snowpiercer”.

I hope to have an in person meeting soon. I hope a coffee shop on a weekend morning would be acceptable.

Thanks so much. Happy Modeling,

Andy Estep

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