 For decades, the Model Railroad Convention and Train Show has been a mainstay of the hobby. Every month of the year now has some model railroading event. But that all changed in March 2020 with the global pandemic. The July 2020 St. Louis NMRA Convention was one of the first national model railroad events of 2020 to fall victim to the pandemic lockdowns. All through the year, national model railroad events also fell victim to the same fate and were likewise cancelled. As of January 2021, the NMRA Santa Clara Convention still seemed to be marching along, bringing back the live national model railroading convention once again. But then sadly the NMRA announced the Santa Clara live convention was cancelled. Still, a glimmer of hope remained. The convention committee announced a four-day virtual convention with all the trimmings in its place for just $49. Joe Fugate recently met with the key convention committee members on a Zoom call to learn more about this amazing last-minute pivot from a live to a virtual event. Let's join Joe as he learns the full story. Tell us about the original convention. What were you going to originally do? Where was it? When was it? What was going to be included in the original convention? The original convention was going to be held in Santa Clara at the Marriott Hotel. And the train show was going to be at the Santa Clara Convention Center. And across the same 4th of July week, the core of the group that's doing this was work the 2000 convention in San Jose. And then that core also did the 2011 national convention in Sacramento. And so we had a good experience group going in. We were doing a number of things from the design and operation perspective because we feel we have a strong core of operational layouts in the Bay Area. And so what we had done is approached a number of historical and technical societies to hold many meets under the roof of the convention, as well as a very strong LG CIG and OPSIG program. And we were going to have something like 30 layouts available for operations. It would have been a very, very strong operational meet just taken by itself. That combined with the prototype focus of the clinic program, we felt would have provided a very, very strong proto-based convention. So that's where we were heading. In March was when the shutdowns, lockdowns and whatever I think started. We started having all of our committee meetings on Zoom, of course. And the direction to everybody was, let's assume this is going to keep on going, going to happen live. And I had set the first of the year as kind of that go-no-go decision point. When you're doing a live convention, you've got all these outside activities, whether prototype tours or general tours and layout tours and so forth. From the businesses and the prototype places, nobody certainly was committing. Half the time they wouldn't even answer the phone. So we had nothing set up there. And when talking to layout owners, nobody was saying, oh yeah, my wife would love to have 50 strangers come tromping through the house in the middle of a pandemic. So basically we were kind of dead in the water, couldn't make any of these things move forward and essentially nothing to sell, other than our good intentions and good looks. Our December meeting asked the question of the elephant in the room. What do you guys think? Do you think we could actually have a live event and are people going to come? 80% of the people said, I don't think so. Somewhere in there we said, gee, let's start thinking about our plan B. How did they develop plan B, the virtual replacement event? A little bit of it was a bit of an ego thing. Honestly, we felt we live in Silicon Valley. The technology comes from here. We've got a lot of people who come from the industry and we'll figure it out. And frankly, we did. We reached around within our ranks. There were a number of us who did telecom and Phil turned out to be the guy who had his finger on this particular technology. My focus in the convention is really on the technology and on how we can use the technology to create a real convention type experience. So, you know, we've had a lot of experiences over the last year of going to small zoom meetings with some friends or going to one of the larger zoom meetings that's been online. And we've realized that it's a very different kind of experience by those large events. So, we're trying to focus on how do we create an environment where you can meet people, have great conversations like you would at a regular convention. So, I'm sure we'll talk a bit about that. But that's really been my primary focus is how do we make it so that instead of this being a video meeting you go to for two hours. It's a convention you want to go to for 60 hours and stay there. So, at this point, of course, we're coming up on the end of January and that's traditionally when the Bay Area SIG meet was held. I've been chairing that group. A fairly easy job because it's the same people and they know what they're doing and you just kind of wind them up and they go. But the idea was let's see if we can make this virtual. And we tried it and I think it worked fairly well. But we realized we had some limitations using the zoom tool, some things we had tried. Didn't work terribly well in that environment. As Bruce pointed out very shortly thereafter, we had a sugar pine PCR convention come up. So we again were able to kind of take what we learned from the SIG meet and what we knew about holding conventions and a whole lot of new knowledge that Phil brought with him about how to how to use the zoom tool more effectively. You know, we talked a little about the sugar pine centennial PCR convention in was it April, I guess. And you know, we were frankly selfishly interested in his test bed for what we wanted to do for Rails by the Bay. Comment, Joe, just about sugar pine. The most interesting comment was a couple of comments that people made at the end of the convention, which was it was easier to meet people. Yes. In the virtual world than it was in a physical convention. And that was something that was not a few people said that that was a very common feeling. That really became the guiding principle that we started with for the sugar pine is carried over to this convention is, you know, create that environment where it's about, you know, building your model railroading connections, so to speak, just a little layout on what we learned that that was a big learning. Having people say they actually preferred that kind of a virtual event to a physical convention was really a powerful comment. Life clinic presentations can have a number of glitches, such as the screen freezing or the audio going fuzzy. Unexpected interruptions such as the clinician getting a phone call in the middle of the presentation can also happen more often than desired. The convention team came up with a clever solution to these clinic presentation problems. And some other lessons that we learned that as Seth mentioned, we did have some little problems with the SIGME in January. And one of the problems we had was that we were doing live clinics. They were recorded on Zoom where they were on Zoom, but the person would come on just like NMRAX and they would share their clinic like sharing the screen. And one of the clinicians had a lot of technical difficulty sharing his clinic. The clinic was fine, but it took about 15 or 20 minutes to get it to share properly. And so you had this space that didn't do anything. So because of that lesson, when we got to Sugar Pine Centennial, we decided that we would record every single clinic. When you take away the possibility for snafus, they don't happen. You've eliminated that possibility. So very early on, I kind of started to insist that if we want to maintain a high level of quality for the production side, we have to record stuff ahead of time. Because when you start introducing all these live things, it's far too easy to get a product that's riddled with all kinds of technical problems. And I can't tell you during the recordings, I can't tell you how many phone rang interruptions there were. The dog came in barking. One was really cute. A little kid came in and was hugging his grandpa. I'll never forget that was really neat. But the point is by recording stuff ahead of time, you can take that stuff out so that the end result is a program that flows the way the presenter really intended for it to. And the quality of the production then is greatly enhanced because you don't have issues with, oh, I can't get my computer to share the screen or whatever it is. There's 100 things that can go wrong when you're doing something live. What do you get for your $49 if you decide to attend this four-day virtual convention? So this is basically a couple of slides that we'll talk about essentially how the convention is organized. And by the way, everyone can have a chance to chime in on this. So the way this is organized is there's the great hall and it is the place where everybody gets together. And then there are two clinic tracks, which are in fact Zoom webinars, which you can jump over and join. And the best way to think about this is to think about if you ever gone somewhere where there was a big room and off of it there was an auditorium with a bunch of seats and you could watch a speaker, the daylight track, clinic track, and the separate clinic track are essentially auditoriums. As a participant in the convention, you go into the auditorium, you watch the lecture, you can ask questions during the lecture using a Q&A tool that's available in the webinar, but it's using chat. It's using text. So what you can do is you can type in a question the clinician either answered the question or they can say, yeah, that question will get answered and the clinic goes on. The great hall is where essentially all the action is. So you think about the great hall is this big room where everybody can meet, but what's on the side of that are 30 little breakout rooms and they're all have names and you can walk around and walk into any of that. So if you look at the great hall, it has all these breakouts and Zoom, there's a little tool that appears at the bottom. When you click on that, you see all the breakouts, but you also see who's in each of the breakouts. So for example, if you click and you see that in the narrow gauge room, there's somebody, you've read a lot of their articles and you'd like to talk to them, you can jump in that room and introduce yourself and be part of the conversation. And you'll notice here, we have two kinds of rooms on the left. We have the clinic goes on rooms, we have six of those, three for each track and on the right, we have a whole bunch of other clinic rooms. And this is kind of our current list of our breakouts and buffs. So the ones on the left, the ones that are highlighted, that are bolded, those are all breakout rooms that have a scheduled birds of a feather at. So what that means is at lunch, which is two hours from noon to 12 California time or at dinner, which is five to seven California time, someone will be in that room on a specific day at a lunch or dinner doing a birds of a feather session. I'm kind of old fashioned. And when we decided to go virtual, I kept trying to think about all the things that we would normally do at a regular convention. And so what we've tried to do is include as many of those activities as possible. I mean, there were a few things that we just couldn't do. Things like the silent auction and the contest although we are having a model or showcase, but there's other things that happen at conventions that we are doing. You meet somebody out in the hall and say, hey Joe, let's go over to the bar and have a few drinks and talk. And so we put together a couple of lounges and that's what they're for. Why don't we go over to this breakout room and just talk for a while because I haven't seen you for a while. So what we're going to have is in that great hall there's an IDO, an information desk operator. And if you've met somebody and you were talking, started talking to someone and one of the clinic goes on, you want to continue the conversation. We have a number of spaces. You just grab one of those spaces, just let them know, hey, we're going to go in and you'll be in there. And if you tell the IDO what you're talking about, then if someone else wants to join you, they can. The information desk officer, think of them when you arrive at a train station and you need to ask some questions about your next destination where you want to go. That's the desk you had to. So we have an information desk officer and another staff member working the great hall meeting. And they'll be available there, sharing slides and information, as well as links in the chat to get to both clinic tracks to make it super easy for our attendees to get to wherever they want to go, which, you know, includes directing them to the, to the correct clinic goes on room where our clinicians are going to be and the other breakout rooms as well. There is an entire slate of layout tours, which the bulk of which were recorded by John and those will be followed on with live panel discussions. You couldn't get to the layout tour for your favorite layout in the Bay Area, but John's bringing it to you. Majority of the owners are participating in those sessions, plus we'll have one of the LDSIGs, what would you do differently panels, which is six more owners, some of them who are also on the owner panels, but there's plenty of opportunities to talk to those owners and ask them about what they did on their layouts and, you know, basically have a good interaction and ask the questions you want. And that would have been very, very difficult to do in a traditional bus tour format. Even in the LDSIG self-guided format, it would be difficult to get that much time without totally monopolizing an owner. The tracks or you can think of them as a birds of a feather in a way. The breakout rooms, but what we've also have is specific times when someone will be there hosting a conversation. So, you know, it's kind of hard if you've got the small-scale rooms and nobody's there. Somebody's got to go in and be the person to sit there and wait for other people to show up. So, rather than doing that, what we've got is a number of times. So what happens every day, there will be six to eight, maybe even 10 of these. And by the way, six of them, we actually have a vendor focus as well. And we have six vendors that'll be in the vendor focus during a lunch or dinner as well and doing the same thing. They'll have a breakout room where they'll be there. Think about it almost as the, as your booth at a convention where people can walk up or you can schedule. We're going to do a presentation at one or, so it's that idea. So there's specific times. So at the morning, you're going to get an email. If you're a convention attendee, you'll get an email. It will give you the links for all the clinics of the day, the Great Hall, but it also tell you what's going on and tell you, you know, at noon today in the narrow gauge track, narrow gauge breakout, Bob Smith is doing a narrow gauge on the Rockies birds of a feather. So if you want to go to that, you can jump into that dialogue. And it's really a way of facilitating, getting conversations started, especially at the beginning of the convention. When people show up, it's kind of like don't understand. And you think you're in a zoom meeting. By the end of the convention, I guarantee you people will be jumping around all the time, all over the place to do different things. Cause you really get used to it very quickly. Cause the metaphor is the regular convention. There's just a bunch of places you go for what you want to learn and who you want to interact with. And I think it's really important to talk about what we're not giving you. Cause we're not giving you any airplane tickets. We're not giving you any hotel costs. We're not giving you any transfers or rental cars. If you think about it, it costs $2,000 to go to a regular convention for $49. It's just almost nothing. So, you know, it's a really interesting thought process to say that what we're not bringing you is all the expense that you would have had to be able to go. Plus, you know, I was talking to somebody on the East coast who said, well, you know, I work. If you live on the East coast, the convention doesn't start till noon. Most of the first set of clinics are over at three. If you get off work at four and you go to the rest of the convention during the week and Saturday, you go to 75% of a national convention and stay at home and be on your job. And if you're on the East coast, then you miss those first three hours because you're at work. You can see them later. You can see that whatever time you want, because they're going to be available to you. If you are in a registered event attendee, you will get a link to basically the event homepage. And literally these are all live links. So what we're telling everyone to do is bookmark this page, put it on your bookmarked bar in your browser. Then you can just click on this whenever you want. It'll open up once you're logged in. It'll just open up. And you just pick whichever one you want to go to and click on it. And you'll immediately be in that zoom room, whether you want to go to the great hall, you want to go to an LDSIG chat, you want to go to a clinic. They're all right here in one location. So from an attendee perspective, it's really easy to get around and get from one place to another. We're going to give you links. If you're in a clinic, you'll get a link to go to the great hall in the chat. But if you bookmark that, you can always jump back there and say, I want to go to next. So what does the future hold? In a world where once again, we can have unrestricted live events. Is there still a place for virtual hobby events? The world is going to demand hybrid events in 2022 and beyond. And so understanding how to take a physical event and extend it into the virtual space is going to become absolutely essential. I work in this world and everybody's talking about the hybrid go back to work environment and how we have hybrid work. And everybody who does conventions is talking about hybrid conventions and how we manage that in the future. And I think in the railroad community, we need to begin to think about the same. Because again, if you think about it, how hard is it for people to go to a convention on the other coast where if I can go to the convention on the east coast virtually and just travel for once to the west coast, maybe I can go to every convention and maintain those relationships and build them. So it's not just about this convention. It's really what we're learning about being able to do the future. I'm sure everybody watching this or listening to my voice right now has heard this lament that, oh, the hobby's dying. People aren't coming to the conventions or they're dying off or whatever. Because the average age of your NMRA members specifically is pretty high up there. And I can tell you that the hobby's not dying. What's happening is it's changing. And there are a lot. There's a huge, very vibrant model railroading community in social media. And they don't see the NMRA as being particularly relevant to them. And I think part of the reason why is because the NMRA doesn't go to where they are to meet them in their space. We can do that with this event. And we can do that in the future with hybrid events where we're bringing people in instead of saying, no, we're going to be limited to whoever can afford it, whoever can be off for a week and whoever can travel. Why would you want to limit yourself? To me, that just seems kind of self-defeating, doesn't it? Something else that hasn't really been mentioned here is that it's combining the old crew that normally attends NMRA events and conventions with a whole new generation of modelers who are out there and active and super social. YouTube live events in the chat, super popular. They love it. Any excuse to hang out and chat with each other, just like NMRA regulars who like to go to conventions and hang out and chat together. So this is an opportunity to really bring those two groups together and help assure the older generation, if they can change a little bit in what they're doing, that the hobby's not going to die. There's people out there. We just have to do things a little differently to make sure that everybody can be included in all these great events and the bits of being in the NMRA. One of the things that occurs to me in listening to all of this, I can see several advantages to a virtual environment in terms of interaction and the ability to interact in ways that you actually can't do in person. And that's an interesting notion because I think what that really says is we need to get this sort of experience out there so that the average modeler knows what a virtual convention feels like and knows what is possible in a virtual convention. And it sounds to me like if you can get that out there, they're going to flock to an event like this. So, Joe, I think you just said the sound bite of this meetup, of this video, which is everybody should go and experience what it's like to go to a real virtual convention. And I have to tell you, for anyone who's sitting out there listening to this saying, you know, I don't want to spend $49. It's on video. Video is supposed to be free in my life and all that. If you miss this, I think you're going to regret it. I think people are going to come away saying this was a seminal opportunity. They met people. I would suggest if you haven't registered, go spend the $49 in register. You're going to have more fun than you can imagine. But also what you're going to experience is things that you can take back to your organizations. If you're part of the NMRA, anyone who is an NMRA superintendent or president who is not attending this convention is missing out on learning the tools that they need to learn to change their organization. You said it perfectly. People really need to experience this to understand what it can be. And this is the opportunity to do that. Train Masters TV. Only from model railroad hobbyist magazine.