 Lewis and Clark may have put St. Louis on the map back in 1804, but since then, we've done pretty well on our own. Come discover all St. Louis has to offer this summer at Gateway 2022. 29 layout tours, 60 plus layouts, Operation SIG Up Sessions, Layout Design SIG Tour, Modeling with the Masters, 15 prototype tours, 114 clinics, 10 non-rail tours, Banquet with Michael Gross, and more! Check out these incredible layouts. St. Louis is waiting for you, book today at Gateway2022.org. For this special segment of What's Neat, I'm sitting here with one of my most favorite people on the planet, Brad Joseph, and the exciting part of creating this video is to simply inform you about the new NMRA convention coming up this summer in St. Louis in August. It's going to be an absolutely fabulous show, and Brad and I are here to tell you about all the details of this, one of the best train shows in the world. So this, Brad, is our opportunity to share what we didn't get to do in 2020, but wow, now we're going to do here in 2022. 2020, yes. I remember it well. It seems like only yesterday. Man, I'm just checking out the updated website here, Ken. You're so proud of this, and a lot of work went into this. Tell me about this website, Brad. This pretty much specifies everything about the show, all the clinics, all the special activities, and the most important part is registration, which is important for people to recognize and want to do to get all the benefits of this great show coming up. Exactly. Well, the website obviously is very important because it's the clearinghouse for all the information, and over the years, it's been difficult for some conventions to get this stuff up early enough that people can really make the selections of the tours they want, schedule the clinics they want to go see and everything in a timely manner. So we worked very hard to have this site up and running with complete content, and it got up and running in about the middle of February with just about everything on it, and we're updating it constantly every day now, and we've got a gentleman, Jimmy Ables, who's doing a phenomenal job keeping things up to date, and holy cow, he's had some things here I don't even know about yet. They've been kept top secret from me. So people can find this website by going to Gateway2022.org, Brad. Tell us about the dates, the times, and the locations on this website. Well, first of all, the general information about the convention, Ken, is August 7th through the 13th, 2022. It's going to be held at the Marriott Grand Hotel on Washington Avenue in downtown St. Louis. And it's a couple blocks from the riverfront, a couple blocks from Baseball Heaven. Yes. And not too far from the home of the former Stanley Cup champion, St. Louis Blues, who who knows, there may be a parade to honor their repeat Stanley Cup victory about the time the convention is going on. But the convention is going to feature the national train show. We've got a tremendous slate of clinics and layout tours that I know we're going to get into later. But the basics are registrations, $175 for the full week of events. There are multiple levels of registrations for spouse, daily, youth, non-NMRA members, all sorts of things. And there's something here for everyone. That's awesome. I realize the fact that tourist travel is really coming back in a big way. But do tell us about the layout tours that are on this website. There's a lot, a great variety of tools and a lot of great events coming up with regards to the tours on this. You said there was 128 clinics and it's amazing, 128 clinics. Just about every possible subject you can imagine. Duinos are very popular. Operations clinics are extremely popular. If you have interest in operations, which is getting to be one of the most common interests in the hobby right now, this is going to be the convention for you. Everything from train orders to timetables to JMRI operations to way bills to setting up for operations out of the box is when you've never done it before, very basic clinics to operate. I know a lot of people are intimidated by the whole operation thing, but there are some very basic clinics to get you started. And let me go backwards if I can to your question about tourism coming back. Layouts, yes. Well, I'm going to jump to the tourism thing if I can, because that's something we worked very hard to keep this a very good value for your money. Tourism is coming back strong and a lot of people are going to be traveling. And in case you haven't noticed, things have gotten pretty expensive here in the last few months. Everything from gas to brisket has gone up. Just going out to dinner has gone up. Yes. But we have our hotel room rate locked in since April of 2020 and guaranteed and that room rate is guaranteed through the early part of June. So you want to jump in and get your rooms reserved for this convention as soon as possible because there is a limited number of rooms at these special rates. But that's a very important item. So with your registration, which is $175, as I said earlier, comes one no charge drive yourself layout tour. And that's a $45 value. When you take that discounted about and you compare that to conventions over the last four or five years, we've got a very, very cost effective convention with tremendous value. There's going to be a good bang for your buck. That's awesome. Jim wanted to basically kind of give us a little bit of what the insight is on this website. We're screen capturing this now so we can show the viewers exactly what it is you're explaining as they see it. Tell us about this website, Brad. Well, I'm going to run through some of these basic tabs and tell you what's there. For instance, new and updated, you can click on this anytime you come back to it and it tells you what has recently been done, what's recently been changed and what's been added. And for instance, one of the things we did just recently here, Jim added the door prize page. We've got a lot of valuable door prizes from brass locomotives to track laying supplies to gift certificates for tourist railroads that are going to be available as door prizes, luck of the draw door prizes. And we're listing some of those manufacturers and companies that have donated here. So that's the new updated section. You've got the accommodations, which talks about rooms and room nights and has the link that you can go to to book your reservation directly with the hotel. Nice. And then we, of course, have a video section. And we're collecting all the videos that we've had here. We've had some other get, or pardon me, what's neat shows. Look who's there, Ken. And you're blocked out in this particular image. But we've had layout tour videos. We've got a little introduction to Michael Gross, who's going to be our keynote speaker. Here's an introductory video that covers all sorts of things about the convention and the video you saw at the beginning of this presentation is going to be posted on here very quickly as well. Very nice video. Very cool, wasn't it? Layout descriptions. We're going to get into that later, along with layout photos and bus tours, self-drive tours, prototype tour information. This is very interesting because we have some very unique prototype tours. For instance, Amstead Rail, where they manufacture a lot of appliances for railroad cars, couplers, trucks, wheels. My best friend and I were in Cuba a couple of years ago on a tour. And we were in this old abandoned yards where this rusted out steam locomotive is sitting there. The trucks on the tender of the railroad car came from Amstead Rail. At that point it was called, had a different name, but from Granite City, Illinois. This tells the number of people that can attend that tour if there's an extra cost, what the tour number is, the date and times. Visit the Berger Railway Library, which is a fantastic location. If you're interested in studying railroad history, man, that is mecca. Continental fabricators, which is the place that's doing a lot of the work on this new Pennsylvania locomotive that's being rebuilt by a group out east, which is a pretty interesting story in and of itself. Gateway Rail services, metro-east industries, where they rebuild a lot of locomotives, micro-engineering, one of our local manufacturers, and sponsor, if I'm not mistaken. I love Ron and all the folks down here at micro-engineering that work so hard to make our layouts look that great. Museum of Transportation with one of the best collections of steam locomotives in North America, Port Harbor Railroad, St. Louis Union Station, Terminal Train Excursion, where you're going to ride around St. Louis on a terminal train and get close-up views of a lot of very interesting industrial railroading. I wouldn't want to do that. That's fantastic. So we've got a great selection there. Let's see what else is available. Besides the prototype tours, here's just some of the information on some of the non-rail tours we've got set up for family and friends that may come along. Grant's Farm. Grant's Farm is a priceless St. Louis tradition. It's free to attend Grant's Farm. You do have to pay to park. You get free beer on the tour. How can you beat that? And at the home of the largest brewery in North America, maybe the world, as far as I know. An Iserbush, how can you go wrong with free beer? But Clydesdale's, Animals, beautiful scenery. The Barnhof, where there's the old bush collection of vintage carriages. That's a very, very cool tour. Shopping at a couple of the malls and shopping areas. Micro breweries in St. Louis. Ladies' Lunch and Shopping in St. Charles. A beautiful historic main street in downtown St. Charles. Tour to the An Iserbush brewery, which is fascinating. Gateway to St. Louis Tour, which is a general tourism tour of the whole city, which shows Union Station, the Gateway Arch, which you may or may not know is here to commemorate Lewis and Clark's departure on their trip to the Pacific Ocean, looking for a Northwest Passage back in 1804. Taste of St. Louis, some very famous St. Louis institutions. Frozen Custer at Ted Drew's. Post on the Hill at Favazas. Quilter's events. So some very nice events there. And following that would be, let's go back up. Let's see what else we have available. Modeling with the Masters, clinic schedule. Tell me about the modeling with the Masters. Well, the modeling with the Masters is actually kind of a part of the clinic schedule. Clinics, correct. But we have master model rarerators, modelers who have achieved the master model rarer designation because of what they've been able to accomplish throughout their modeling lifetime. And they will actually be present to walk you through and teach you how to do a specific project at the convention. And we have, I believe, there's about a dozen those projects. For instance here, this particular one is building a branch line coaling facility. So there's a cost for each of these items, $48 for this event. Supplies, tools, Mr. Youngblood, Peter Youngblood. Peter Youngblood's amazing. There you go. And he's going to walk you through construction of this item. Building structures with card stock and paper. And there's a particular mining structure that's going to be built here. And there's a list of all the tools that are necessary and required, a list of the materials that are necessary. And you're going to go from stack of materials and tools in front of you to a completed structure or item with guidance from one of these gentlemen that are experts in their fields. Now that is a very unique opportunity to be able to be taught how to build some of these things that we've seen on people's layouts and magazines. Speak with them, have one-on-one hands-on instruction while this is going on. And that's going to be on the, I believe it's the Washington room at the downtown hotel. So that's modeling with the masters. Now, should we jump to the clinic list? Yes. I really want to know who the clinicians are, because you said there's 128. That's a lot. And I want to be able to schedule myself in to see the ones I want. Well, let me make a couple of things very clear. First of all, clinics are all free of charge. You can go to any number of clinics that you wish. You can make a feeble attempt to attend them all if you want. But I don't think it can be done. You know, there's these people who try to ride every single ride at Disneyland. And then the mega version of that, my daughter used to work at Disneyland, so I know that, or Disney World, actually. The mega version of that is the people who ride every ride at Disney World and then fly to Disneyland three hours early and ride them all there. Wow. That can be done, but I don't think you can attend every single clinic. So we've got clinics starting at 8 in the morning and going until 8 at night, Monday through Thursday, just about completely full at this point, six rooms. And I'll pull out a few of these names. Doug Geiger, George Bogatek with... We love George. Yeah, with Soundtracks. John Lawrence, Marty Vaughn, very famous name. Molly Butterworth, who was the director of the National Museum of Transportation, St. Louis and who's done a fantastic book on trains and trolleys in St. Louis. Her book will be there available for sale and she'll be happy to autograph and put a notation in there for you. Let's see who else we have. Bruce Evans, Bob Frank Rohn, who by the way does an article every month in the NMRA Magazine about loads and flat car loads, gondola loads. He's gonna be doing clinics on those. Mark Jewett, who's a DCC expert. All sorts of things. By the way, he's doing one of these setting up for operations tours I talked about earlier. I've attended a few of Mark's clinics. They are fantastic. He's an expert at imparting just the right amount of information, giving you just the right amount of detail so you can go home and implement that stuff right away on your layout. Perfect. So we have John Bate. Here's Speed Muller on Arduinos. We have Gilbert Thomas, David Lowell on the Chicago and Illinois Midland, a very, very interesting railroad up around Springfield, Illinois that a lot of people don't know anything about. And it goes on with a lot of famous modelers who you are able to raise your hand and ask a question. But another feature we're very proud of, Ken, of this convention, is the After Hours Clinic Club. No disco ball, no club music. But many of these clinicians are going to head to the Special Interest Group room, which is the Statler Ballroom at the hotel after their clinic presentation. And they're gonna hang out with you there to clarify and give you more information and more details about the presentation they just made. There you go. So you want an opportunity to ask a more detailed question than somebody did at the clinic or there wasn't time, now's your chance. And that's very, very thoughtful, these clinicians to volunteer even more of their time to help us all learn more about our hobby. God, this has got me so excited. I got two questions I wanna ask and I know they're commonly asked in the big years past to me and that is, first of all, the show, the part of the show that I like to go to so I can work and learn what the manufacturers have got new and make new contacts, which is always important to me when I used to do photography. That is the National Train Show. Now, the National Train Show itself that's on Saturday and Sunday is that part of this convention? Well, Ken, you're only slightly mistaken. Okay. It's Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Oh, okay. And you know what's special about Friday? Nobody gets in except the convention attendees. Okay. Which is no charge for the convention attendees and not only to get in, but we have free air conditioned bus shuttle service from the hotel to Convention Center in Townsville, Illinois. That's nice. So those are some special arrangements that we had. And yes, indeed, the National Train Show is a part of the convention and there are oftentimes major manufacturers or product announcements and we're aware of several that we have to keep under our hat at this point that are coming to St. Louis that people are not gonna wanna miss. True that. Am I right about that? I'm not allowed to speak. No, nothing. Another question a lot of people ask all the time, Brad, is do you have to be an NMRA member to be part of this? Well, most people think you do. The facts are you do not have to be an NMRA member. Now, there is a special surcharge for people who are not NMRA members, which is only fair because of the support of the organization. But many people who are not NMRA members come to the convention and decide to become one after the fact because of the multitude of benefits. But the facts are you do not have to be a member and you can come and attend every single event of this convention without being a member of the National Moderator Association. You just don't know the key word that's in my mind. What are the benefits to being an NMRA member, Brad? What do we have another hour, hour and a half on this? Give it your best shot. Well, so the National Moderator Association had their first convention in 1937 in Milwaukee. I went to my first one, by the way, in 1960. I was a pretty young guy. I was not quite two. But the National Moderator Association has a huge number of benefits to being a member. But I personally believe the most important benefit is the National Moderator Association is who sets the standards for model railroad items and production pieces and things that are manufactured. Everything from gauge to rail profiles. And the most important of all in my opinion is DCC. You can get a lens decoder and put it in an athern locomotive and run it with an NCE controller. And it's all going to work because of the NMRA standards. There's a lot of other benefits as well. The Achievement Program, where you have an outline of items that over the years you want to build and construct and learn. And you can eventually earn the Nom de Plume, Nom de Gaer, master model railroad. The Achievement Program is very, very popular and very important. Special interest groups. For people whose interests are narrowed beyond the overall hobby itself. And two of those groups are going to have huge presence in St. Louis. Perhaps you'd have a question about them. I'll tell you what. The one thing that always stuck in my mind was the benefit that they offer the insurance. Oh, insurance. The insurance for the model railroaders, their collections and or liability insurance also is a part of that. And that's those details you can find on the NMRA's official website. Exactly, exactly right. That is a very important benefit as well. And I personally have that collectible insurance. My father's house burned in a fire and had a horrible issue with his collection. That's not the case with the NMRA. That's awesome, Brad. Brad, you've covered a lot of material here and shared a lot of benefits coming up here in this August. I do want to say I just found out today I'm on the layout tour on Thursday from one to six. So guys, sign up for that. I have to have the garden railroad and everything working around here. You better get to work. I know, right? Get rid of the rubber snakes. Any other things that you think you might want to talk about or cover? Well, yes. I do want to talk about the layout tours, Ken. First of all, we have about 64 layouts on tour and some very unique ones, by the way, if I can run over just a few of these here. For instance, Kurt's drawer and his KCS. You don't see many KCS layouts. I love Kurt. Bob Johnson's Sioux line, Bill Wehmeyer's MKT. Jeff Kiebler's old reliable, the LNN, which is a rare and near and dear to my heart. The Webster Grows O-Scale Club that's been in business since 1938. I know. My best friend, Steve Goring, is Illinois Terminal Railroad. There's cicadas in the background. He turns up the humidity in the basement, so it's just like being out in a cornfield in central Illinois in 1954. Frisco line by John Paluso. An amazing array of narrow gauge layouts is in St. Louis. You've got Bob Lenz and his kind of freelance version of the Colorado Midland called the Colorado Western Aspen Junction. Herb Kennegg, the cordite and flat river with a beautiful model, the Devil's Gate Bridge outside of Georgetown, Colorado. Randy Myers Canyon, Rocky Mountain. Love, Randy Myers. Do you know his layout was designed by the famous John Armstrong? I've, yes. The plans are hanging on the wall. Isn't that cool? It's amazing. Pete Smith's SN3 masterpiece, the Loon Lake Railway Navigation System. If you've never seen that railroad, you ought to yourself to see it. And I guarantee you, there will be loons in attendance, and some of which are not model railroaders, actually. Then, maybe you've heard, maybe some of you've heard of a fellow by the name of Eric Brumann? Eric Brumann, hmm. He's got a pretty nice layout as well, called the Utah Belt. Utah Belt, right. What is breathtaking. Yep, you can tour here in St. Louis, and we have multiple types of tours and multiple different ways to get to see some of these layouts. It's amazing the amount of various types of layouts that we've seen published in the model press for the last 30 years, and you'll be able to see those layouts here in St. Louis. Now, we have four different types of layout tours. Not all layouts are on every type of tour. Not every layout is on each tour of each type either. So you need to check these schedules regularly and get your ticket purchases made so you do not miss the opportunities to see the layouts you want. So we have bus layout tours. The traditional layout tour that you're all familiar with, where you get on a nice air conditioned bus in the hot summer humidity in St. Louis, you drive to people's layouts. We have 19 of those, I believe. Don't quote me in the exact figures, but they're all here on the left side, as you can see. Bus tours, self-drive tours. The second type of tour we have is the self-drive tour. Remember, one of those is complimentary with your registration. You get to select any one of those self-drive tours. You'll get a map the day of your tour and you can drive and spend as much time as you want at any of those particular layouts. The advantage there, of course, is if you walk into one and they model what you model, you see a structure, you think, holy cow, how this get done. You can take as much time as you want to talk to that layout owner and learn about that layout. You also have the Layout Design Special Interest Group tour, which is a series of layouts. You have to be a Layout Design Special Interest member to go on that tour. But these are a specific series of layouts that have intriguing layout design elements. Something unusual, something extremely well done, something classic that was presented very well. And the fourth kind, which is my favorite of all, is the Operations Special Interest Group tours. Once again, you have to be a member of the Operations Special Interest Group, but you can select from a very well done collection of model railroads that operate beautifully and go to those people's layouts for an operating session. Now, both of those have link outs from the category on our website where you go to their specific websites to actually register and secure those particular layouts. Sounds amazing. How about that? There are different ways to go and see layouts at the Gateway 2022 convention. It's gonna be a busy week, isn't it? It's gonna be a busy week. Holy cow, you know, it's amazing how much we've completed here in this amount of time. We had this convention almost done in 2020 and we thought it's gonna be easy to do it in 2022. It hasn't been too easy because a lot's changed. Yes, but you guys are good. You guys are good at what you do. I've seen your meetings and I know your talents. We're working very hard on it. There's three other people involved, John Schindler, Bob Amsler and Jim Ables, who have worked very hard. There's a large number of people below that level, below those four people that are helping as well. And I don't have the time to thank all of them at this point, but believe me, you'll wanna thank them when you see how well we've put this together. And speaking of putting it together, something else I'd like to imagine if I may, or mention if I may. You see, so here's the clinic schedule. This is not a printable document, a PDF. However, thanks to some requests we had from some registrations, some registries. Registrants, pardon me. We have a whole series of documents here that Jimmy just added. These are PDFs that you can print out to make your planning go smoother. So you can relate your clinic schedule with your, drive your self layout tour schedule with your non-rail tour schedule and figure out exactly how these are gonna work and fit in together. This sounds absolutely fantastic. That in itself is a valuable asset in that. That's what I would do. I would print them off and I'd go through my list. You know, I went to a convention a couple of years before we stopped having conventions. I won't mention which one. But for instance, that operations specialist group layout tour thing wasn't set up until about three weeks before the convention. Wasn't, so you couldn't do a lot of this planning because it's very difficult to get all this information together in the right place and keep juggling it and updating it. We've had some layout owners that have had to step down or step back from offering their layouts on tour. We've had just the opposite. People who come through at the last time. This morning as a matter of fact, I got an email from a fellow who says, hey, you know what? I finally decided I'd like to present a clinic at this convention. Do I, can I do it? Do you still have room? The answer is yes. We're gonna make room for the guy. He's not on here yet. We'll get that updated tonight. Don't worry. Wow, it sounds like you've just about covered everything. What'd you say? Geez, I don't know. I don't know if I've covered everything. I can't tell what I've covered or haven't covered. The fact is we'll give you weekly updates on the What's Neat This Week podcast that we shoot every Saturday night. We're gonna have you and some of the other folks on that you mentioned that are helping set up this show. So we will completely keep you updated with any new news as it comes along. Here's the key item right here. Ladies and gentlemen, please register. Register early, register often. No, I'm actually just kidding about that. But we have to plan bus tours for the number of tickets we sell. We have to plan the banquet for the number of people that are going to attend. And with the current economic environment, we have to commit to some of these things a lot earlier and more permanently, if you will, than we have in the past. So if you have the intention of coming to join us, register, take advantage of that, no charge, drive yourself layout tour that's a $45 value. Come visit us in St. Louis. We are gonna have a fantastic time. The first time in two years we've been able to get together with all of our friends. This is exciting. Learn a lot about the hobby. It's better than watching a video. It's better than getting a still magazine. Be sure to check out the website at gateway2022.org for all the information that Brad has talked about on this. And Brad, I think he just pretty much summarized it. Great, as always, Kim. Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate all your hard work that supports the greatest hobby in the world. Thanks, buddy. And that is a special segment for What's Neat.