FREMO organized a Scandinavia/North Europe meeting in Kolding between October 4th and October 7th. Two large halls where booked, each had an area of about 800 square meters. One hall was used for the H0-RE layout and one for the US-layout. This is a report from the US-part of the meeting. This was the first time modules and members from Sweden participated in a US-meeting. We were nine new FREMO members who traveled to this meeting. We brought with us 18 modules built according to the Southwest division’s standard. Most of our modules are built with double track mainline and single track for branch line. During this session we represented Union Pacific (UP) as the mainline traffic carrier.
We were somewhat nervous before attending this meeting. The planning together with the guys from Denmark and Germany has gone well but now the truth was coming closer. Would our modules live up to the quality standards within FREMO? How would we handle the foreign languages? Most of us , from Sweden, don’t speak German, some of us understand a little German but some have never studied German. We soon realized that we had nothing to be nervous about.
The Danish members brought modules representing the Southwest or Midwest parts of the US. Their modules were used to expand the UP mainline and to build a Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) branch line. From Germany came a few modules from the Southwest Division and several modules representing the Northeastern part of the US. All of them formed a CSX district with several branches extending in all directions.
This was, according to the more experienced members, the largest FREMO US-layout ever. More than 150 modules with a total length of 286 meters filled the hall . The assembly of the module layout went very well but we did, however, experience some DCC problems with the Loconet Gateway. This delayed the start of the operating sessions.
The operating sessions was everything we could ever desire in a an operating session. . For this meeting, a modern era chosen with engines and cars from 1980 to 2012 . Three dispatchers coordinated the traffic on the layout. Every dispatcher used a walkie-talkie. Each dispatcher used a separate channel to communicate with the engineers on his part of the railroad. More than 100 engines where used to run the traffic.
Cars were interchanged from through -freights on one railroad to through- freights on another railroad. They reached their final destination with the help of a local train. The mixed freight trains shared the tracks with unit trains of autoracks, container cars or coal cars and Amtrak passenger trains. It looked great, almost like rail fanning in the real world.
All our modules worked fine and the colors of our modules matched the colors of the modules from Southwest division very well. The language wasn’t a big problem. Everything was solved with a smile and we made lots of new friends during this first meet. The ability to communicate with the hands is a gift used all over the world, this proved to be quite useful at times! We are already looking forward to the next time we will get a chance to participate in a FREMO US meeting. We had to drive 850 km to get to Kolding but it was worth it, without doubt!
Roland Levin
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