 Hi, I'm Michelle Kempova with the Colorado Model of Railroad Museum, and October What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is What's Neat for October 2018. I'm your host Ken Patterson, and this month we've got a great show. This month we go to Kansas City to the NMRA Nationals. We interview four modular layouts and talk to 11 manufacturers, distributors, importers, and museums, including a great interview with Tony Kester, that very respected publisher that we all know that's been in the model press for over 50 years. Plus we also take a look at the Colorado Model Railroad Museum with Michelle Kempova, and she explains to us what a great place that is with a 5,000 square foot layout, which is perfect for planning your vacation when you go to Colorado. And if you do that, be sure to go to my favorite train store in Colorado, Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado. Thank you very much for sponsoring the What's Neat show. And if you need your Model Railroad products right away, you can order them right after this show at mycaboose.com with over 142,000 products on their internet website. It's a magnificent place to check out. So Kansas City was a beautiful, beautiful city by day. From my view in the hotel room, the trains look just like Model Railroad models running through the center of the city. You could see that beautiful western auto building that Chuck Hitchcock built and put on his famous Santa Fe layout that we're all familiar with. And at nighttime, this beautiful building had a neon sign on it, that gorgeous western auto sign that just lit up and complimented the entire Kansas City skyline. The show was very well organized and very well put on this year. So enjoy these interviews and all this wonderful content in about 52 minutes for this month's October What's Neat. I'm standing here with Dusty McCoy here at this beautiful Fremo layout. An absolutely awesome Dusty. This thing is huge. How many modules do you have here? We have 61 modules here. And not only do you have 61 modules, but this is a very well thought out layout. The scenery is absolutely prototype, would you say? Yes, very much so. And that's one of the things that we really gear towards in Fremo is achieving a higher level of realism with our not only way we operate, but with our scenery as well. I'm so impressed with the size. You said there were 60 over 60. How many? 61 modules. And what does that trains like to you think in track? 500, 600 feet of track? I think we've got about 500 feet of track. All right. And now it takes a great system to run a layout like this. What kind of system do you use? We use the Digitrax DCC system. Digitrax. So Digitrax system, that's a pretty good system for a very big layout like this. Do you guys have signals? We do have signals. And who do you like to use for that? We use the MSS signal system. Okay, it's beautiful. I love looking at these signals as they trains and when the trains go by. Pretty cool. Now you've got this bridge here. This bridge has got to be better than 40 feet long. And this is a prototype? Yes. This is modeled after. And this is by Andy, our gentleman sitting over here. And this is modeled after the Lackawanna Railroad, Nicholson Viaduct in Nicholson, Pennsylvania. I remember photographs of that. Now Andy walking over here, you're the artist that built this bridge. How many hours, Andy, have you got in this model? How many years? Three. Three years. Wow. And it's made out of? Quarter inch MDF and pink Owens Corning foam insulation. Do you set this up in your layout at home? No. The idea is to take it portable with the Fremont setups. How many sections has this come apart in? Every pair of arches is a section. So there's five sections. And then you got... You are absolutely to be commended. This is amazing. I can't get my head around this bridge. It is absolutely prototypical. And you know, we're always trying selective compression. You didn't do that here. No. I was going to only do maybe a couple of pair of arches but when it became so readily recognizable on Facebook and the comments, I said, I got to do the whole thing. Andy, that's awesome. Now tell me, Dusty, how many model groups are represented in this layout setup? Well, individuals, we have three major model groups here. One is Missouri Valley Fremont, out of Omaha, Nebraska. Two is Southern Kansas Fremont, out of Kansas. And three is Southern California Fremont. And then we have just several individuals that came and brought modules. We've got modules from California, from Colorado, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois. God, this is the best hobby in the world. I keep saying that. Now, I want to talk about how long did it take you to set this up? Last two days, we put in about 22 hours setting up this railroad. And you've been planning this for months? We've been planning this for two years. Two years. When we found out that NTS was going to be in Kansas City this year, we really started planning about four years ago talking about this but have really been in active planning the last two years. And we have our Lucas Seiler, our layout planner. We spent over 150 hours designing the railroad. When we would have, for other reasons, people couldn't attend and come and it was really kind of fluid up until the last two days. But a lot of guys that worked really, really, really hard to make this happen, our DCC group that worked out and putting down a lot. We had 12 blocks on this railroad. And they did a fantastic job getting this railroad up and going. A lot of people, a lot of work came together and a lot of experience from shows to make this railroad happen. One of the things that we did a little differently is we really tried to put some structure in this time. We're using a dispatcher for the railroad and really had some standard operating rules on link the trains and to make everything fit in sightings and flow like a railroad. How long of a train can you run on this with your rules this weekend? We can get up to probably about a 50 car train. That's still reasonable. You can get three or four engines. You're at your max on pull. Now, the last thing I wanted to say, I know this is built at Fremont standards. You've got a standard bench height of about 50. 50 inches. So if other people build Fremont layout modules, they would fit with this layout, wouldn't they? Yes, they would. So it's why we can get guys from California and guys from Kansas and we can come together, set everything up. And if we build it to standard and build it right, then it all operates like it should. Could I convince you guys to set this up at St. Louis as a 2020 national? Where are you thinking about it? Yes. Two years away. Just two years away. We're already thinking about it. The red carpet's out for you guys. This is a magnificent layout and I really appreciate you sharing it with the viewers on our What's Neat show. All right. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it, Ken. You have a great day. Thank you. Enjoy the show. Great. Appreciate you having us. Thank you. Hi, I'm Joshua Barton with What's Neat this week and we're here at the 2018 convention and I'm here with James Wright. Hi, James. How are you? Hey, Josh. How's it going? I'm still pretty good. Any barbecue in your pocket? I don't know. I forgot it in St. Louis. Oh, no. Okay. We'll have to settle for KC BBQ. That's right. I don't know if I'm done with that, though. Sorry, everybody. KC. So what's going on? How's the show? It's wonderful. Yeah. It's overload. Yeah, it is. It's my first national convention and I don't know which way to go next. Yeah. I suggest a methodical back and forth motion to cover everything. That's a good strategy. Yeah. Hey, this is James Wright and Josh Barton. You're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. I'm standing here with Joe Fugate from Montereyward Hobbyist magazine, that Internet magazine that is absolutely the most well-known Internet magazine for Montereywarding so far that's out there. You've got some fantastic numbers. You've got years of experience, Joe, and we love what you do. But you know what? I also know you've got a passion for trains because it's all around us. Yeah. This is your TOMA layout that you brought to Kansas City. He showed us pictures on the podcast about three weeks ago, and it was stilts. How did this get built so quick, Joe? Well, just a lot of hard work, but you know, like you say, passion, right? It's just had that dream in mind of where I was going and just keep working till I get there. And you know, reality is this is TOMA thinking, and I also pushed the envelope on some techniques. And so I was thinking, going into this, are some things are going to work, some things that aren't. And so I do have some things that didn't work. And so I'm going to take what I learned and go back to Portland and build version two. Now, isn't the Annamarie show closer to your neck of the woods next year? Yes, it's in Salt Lake. So instead of four days driving, it's two days. Okay. Well, I look forward to maybe coming out there and hanging out with you. And I see you're using this new proto throttle on the layout. Did I get the name of this right? Yes, that's a hoot. Do you like this? Oh, it's a hoot. To me, it totally transforms how you operate. You know, years ago, I used, got to play with the True Action Throttle, remember Len Westcott and the True Action Throttle, anybody that's been in the hobby for years will remember that. And then, you know, I played with sound locomotives over the years and sounds an interesting novelty. But what this does is this takes the tactile feel coupled with sound, the modern sound locomotives have braking and takes that whole transistor throttle with momentum thing, puts it all together in one package. And now all of a sudden when I'm throttling up and I can hear the local throttle up before it starts moving, I can see that it's received my, what I'm trying to do. Or when I'm braking and I hear that brake squeal when it comes to a stop. All of a sudden now everything's come together. The sound is, is responding to what I'm doing and it's great. So you like it. How many are you going to get? Gee, I don't know. What do you thought about that? Do you need one for a layout or do you need more than one of these to run? Well, it depends on what my guys think. I need to try my operators out on it. You know, if they like it, I'm going to have to get more than one. Yeah. That's cool. Joe, we love you coming here to Kansas City. The booth looks great. Everything you've done for this hobby with the magazine, thank you so much. And your layout that you got done this week, Rock and Roll. You actually are a model roader. Good job. That's right. Thanks, Joe. You bet, Ken. Thank you. Okay. I'm Kevin. And I'm Elizabeth. And you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. Ken Patterson. For this segment of What's Neat, I am standing with two of my most favorite people in the industry, Stacey Woffers, or otherwise known as Stacey Naffa Woffers. And of course her father, Phil Woffers. We all know Phil. Now, Phil, we know that you'd rather be flying planes while she's holding down the fort there at home. But between the two of you, you guys have really done something for our industry. It can't even be calculated what you've done with regards to train sets, making the hobby easier to understand for the new people. It's just, it's a very methodical process that you all have mastered. But beyond working all the time, I know that both of you have a bit of a passion for the hobby. Tell me about y'all's passion for trains. Well, let me, let me start because I, I was born first, okay? All right? So my passion for trains has been to be able to bring products to people that they really enjoy. If you take a look right now at all the, like the cornerstone kits that we have, there's so many things that you can do with that. So many, literally, almost anything that you want to create. You can create there. Then you've got all of our, the locomotives, the freight cars. We're getting into the scenery products now. We've got the accessories. We've got our new electronics. We've got all these products. So we've got everything that you need to make. And so my joy comes from having taken that, kind of a, maybe a narrow band of products and just enlarged it so that we would have all this product. I have to be honest with you. I didn't do it. I, I mean, I know, it's a family company. I know this comes in a big shock. I didn't do it. We've got, we've got some really great product development people back in Milwaukee. Very creative, very knowledgeable, very tuned in to what the modelers want. And they are constantly coming up with stuff. The reason I come to these shows though, is so I can see what we're making. Because they never tell me about this stuff. And then when I get to the show, I was like, wow, this is so cool. That is so cool. God, Stacy, how cool is it to work with dad every day? It's really great. Actually that's, that's kind of my, that is my passion to, to come back to the business. Actually kind of came in two generations of our family. My son was crazy about trains when he was four years old. And at the same time, I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my career and the opportunity to work with my dad was really, really special. And around that time, my grandfather actually was ill. And we were turning 75 as a business, and he gave a nice little video speech. And he talked about the greatest honor in his life was to work with his father and with his son. And so at that moment, a little light bulb went off when I had a kid who was crazy about trains, and I just thought I have to, I have to do this. I have to keep promoting such a creative, great hobby. And to be able to work with my dad has been like the ultimate privilege. So I feel like a really, really lucky human to be able to have done that. And then to do it in an industry which is so constructive and productive. And where people connect with one another, it is like a big family. Like the people who you meet in the hobby, I think that's what I love. I love people connecting with people over things that are meaningful. And I think that our hobby is meaningful. It's really, really a productive use of free time. Wow, dad, she's awesome. Is she good? I know. And you gotta remember, like you said, it's a family company. You've got the process down. Every time you two go to work, you're among all your friends and family. And you've got over 100 of them, don't you now? Yeah, we've got a good staff back. So a lot of people to run Walther is one of the most. Yeah, we do not do it alone, not even close. They just all make us look, they make us look good. That's awesome. I want to thank the both of you for sharing yourselves with the viewers of What's Neat, because this is the best hobby in the world. And it's made of great people just like this. Thanks, thanks. Hi, mom. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm standing in the auditorium of the convention for the NMRA National here in Kansas City. And John Young, you've got this beautiful modular layout set up here that caught my eye as I just checked into my hotel. And you've said you've been set up for four days. Tell me, John Young, from Michigan about this gorgeous modular layout. This is the Operation Roadshow Layout. We're from Saline, Michigan. This layout was created to teach you how to do things that you needed to teach people how to enjoy time, table, and train order operation. We take on 12 people at a time. We run a three hour session. The idea is to have fun with it and to get a chance to learn the techniques involved in doing this in a very non-confrontational manner. Wow, three hours. That's like anti the way it is these days on the internet. Three hours is a long time. And I see they just started the clock. Is that what they're doing right now? Yes, they are having an ops session right now behind us. We've got six two-man crews out there. They've all been given assignments. Anything from passenger trains to local trains doing the actual switching in the towns. So you're really teaching people that don't know how to operate how to do it? Yes, that's exactly what the idea was behind this layout. But when we come to the National Convention, we take all everybody who wants to play the game. So we frequently have very experienced people here that have operated on very many other layouts. And their skills get passed on to a bunch of new people that would normally get that chance. Wow, John. Now, I had the Midwis Valley Modelers Layout back in St. Louis for many, many years that layout was in publications. And I can appreciate the work that it takes to do a modular layout set up. And I've seen some things here that you've done that are absolutely magnificent. First, you do stack the layout when you transport it. Yeah, that's true. We have a whole racking system. We stack three layout or three components of the layout in each of these racks. Then we bolt on casters to be able to move them around. We use two trailers that we own. And then we rent some other vehicles to make it happen. This time it happened to be a 26 foot box truck. Yes. I remember pricing trailers one day. About $5,000 a piece back then is what they were. And it would almost fit. But box trucks, you get to give them back. Well, this is true. But we do own the trailers. And the box truck was a bit pricey. But it was a requirement to do it this year. Now, John, tell me how many feet of mainline you've got. OK, we have 400 foot of mainline. There are eight distinct towns here that include passing sightings. Each of those towns has a telephone to call in. It has a active train order signal that the dispatcher can control. What else? It's amazing to have signaling on a modular layout. Whose system do you use? We use Bob Milhoff's system. He invented it. He's the fellow behind the camera right now. I know. Look at this. You've got the operations switchboard. What is this called? Well, it's dispatcher's board. Dispatcher. That's right. OK. So how many modules in total? 34 modules in total. And that's a lot of legs to paint and a lot of things to wire. How about your wiring? What do you use for the wiring between modules? Well, the wiring is 12 gauge. And we use Anderson power poles to carry the connection between the modules. We also have the local net strung between the modules. We also have a grounding cable runs along the layout. And we have the telephone wires running along the layout. It's awesome. What kind of track do you guys use? We bought this from Custom Tracks in Iowa. It was a new product on the market at the time. It looks like it's hand-laid, and it was, but not by us. Name of the club is? The name of the club is Operations Roadshow. And if you Google that, you can find our own location. Yeah, just Google that. That's great. Tell me, John, what was your favorite part of this layout if you had a favorite part? My favorite part is interacting with all the people we have come in here. But the thing I'm proudest of is this was started by five close friends 22 years ago. And we're all still involved, and we're all still very tight friends. That's the beauty of the hobby. And I've heard it over and over again. It's not about your modeling skills. Even though they're fantastic, it's about the relationships. That is. And that's what the national NMRA is all about. I love this hobby. It's the best hobby in the world. I agree. Yeah. John, this is an awesome layout. I appreciate you sharing this with the modelers of What's Neat. Hi, my name's Dale Shipman. You're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm with Tom Flores from Train Tracks here at the Annamarie National in Kansas City. And Tom, you've got a product that a lot of shoplifters are very familiar with. And that is this RFID technology, not to keep track of merchandise, but to keep track of your trains on your layout. Tell us about this cool product. Well, if you're familiar with the AEI readers on train cars, as you see in the cars, the way it does in the real life, it picks up the car and tells you exactly what it is. It has all the contents of it, where it's going, and where it's coming from. Right. So what we're doing is we actually scale it down to this little tag right here. OK. And basically, the way this works is like in real life. The train will go over a said reader at the industry. It will tell what to do. If you want to go ahead to fill it up, or if you want to go ahead and take out the content of it. So go ahead and pick up a drop off. The next cool thing about it is, as it does too, is it's a tracking system for your car. So you know exactly where this thing is on your layout at any given time. So if I put one of those in one of my trains, I can tell where my train's running on my layout. Not only that, we also have dispatch capability. And if I wanted to dispatch your trains from your house, I can do it from my house down in San Antonio, Texas. This is fantastic. And then what's the price point to get into a system like this? The price point, we have a smaller one here. And this is our three pack. And this one goes for $179.99. Okay, and there's three readers in here? There's three readers. We have 25 tags in here. We also have a Raspberry Pi, which communicates with it. Raspberry, there's a whole lot of litany that you can look at. Now the tags are what I put on my freight train. So I got 25 tags for freight cars, three readers to read around the layout. And that's a pretty good deal. And this is gonna work with DCC systems. Absolutely. So Digitrax, NCE, the whole bit. Everybody, you can even work for analog if you wanna go that route. This is fascinating, Tom. A lot of people have talked about this on the internet. It's the first time to actually see it in person. Tell me what website do they need to check out to look at this. You can come to www.traintrax.com and we are gonna have all our pricing point on there. If you wanna find more information on how this thing works, we'll be more happy to do that for you guys. That's awesome. This is exciting. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Mr. Patterson. Thank you. I'm standing with one of the most respected, published model railroaders in the industry. And I mean that with sincerity and love, Tony Kester. I've been following your work my entire life and I'm honored to have you talk with the viewers of the What's Needs show. We already all know you. We respect you. But brother, tell me about this wonderful passion you still have for trains. You know, that's one of the hardest things to explain because if we could really figure that out, we could sell it. You know, we could walk up to anybody on the street and give them an ABCDE case and they go, I get it, trains. And it's just not that easy. Somehow as a toddler, you know, run to the window to see a train, the only thing I've seen like that is my grandson, one of my grandsons, from the time he was a toddler. He just got it, you know, grandpa's trains and now he's a college junior long snapper University of Rhode Island football team back up, I guess. And he just gets trains. I mean, he just, he gets it. So I wish, I wish I could explain what the magic is. I think that's the juice, is you brought somebody young, you've inspired them, would you say? Well, I think what I did inspire them, but I don't think I personally did in the sense that if it wasn't there, in other words, I didn't have a basement full of railroad, it wouldn't have triggered something. But fortunately he was born while the Allegheny Midland still exists, which means December of 1999, I think we took it down. I've never been quite sure whether it was there or 2000, but right around the turn of the century. And he saw that. And I have pictures of him and his mom holding him up. And something triggered right at that point in time. And man, if we could just figure out how to distill and sell that, we could double this hobby overnight. You're awesome. Tony, I want you to know I've stolen a line out of one of your videos. And one time you said in a video, this is the best hobby in the world. And I use it every week on the show. It comes from you because you said it on one of your videos and it's the truth, right? Well, I have horrible news for you. It's copyrighted and my lawyers will be in touch shortly. That's okay. You got cornfield pictures in one of your books and we never, but that's another story. So I love you, I respect you. I know, don't worry about that. It's on me, brother. I was modeling your cornfields there for a while. It's all good. We share. We both promote the hobby. I know we're into promoting ourselves to a degree because there is a little bit of, you know, something at the end of that rainbow, but it's really about promoting the hobby. And we both, if nothing else, I'm trying to do it like you did it. Well, I honestly don't know how I did it or how I am doing it, but I think when you really enjoy something, people pick up on that. Yes. And I think if you don't really enjoy it and you're just doing it for a living, I think they also pick up on that. Right, if you clock out at five o'clock and you have no passion. Yeah, you can see that. And that's okay. I mean, we need worker bees too, but I'm not, I can't clock out at five o'clock, as my wife will cheerfully tell you that, but then again, if we're sitting down watching TV and I sort of reach over for the remote, she'll say, don't you have something to do in the basement? Amen. So she even liked smaller. Tony, you're the best. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes with me. I love you. Ken's great to see you again. Thanks for stopping by. Okay, I'm standing by a Lego layout, which to us HO scalers and O-Gauge guys, it's a little foreign and it seems toyish, but I gotta tell you what, gentlemen, I am blown away at what I am seeing in diversity and quality of what I'm looking at. Guys, introduce yourselves and tell me what is it we're looking at here on this layout? My name's Glenn Holland. I'm a member of PenLug, which is the Pennsylvania Lego users group. This is our layout and we're joined by the Texas Brick Railroad, where you split into two halves. We have the yard and they have the other half. What scale is this? It's what we call L-Gauge. L-Gauge, well I guess it's a Lego gauge. Yeah, it's Lego's own gauge they can't come up with. Does it look to me like it's O-Scale almost? It's not quite O-Scale. It's a little larger than true O-Scale gauge. So our trains are somewhere in the 146 scale range. I'm seeing steam engines. I'm seeing 844 UPs. I see the Greyhound Challenger, the Southern Pacific Daylight. Now tell me, are these gorgeous models or these kits? None of the models you see operating on our layout, none of the houses or anything like that is a kit. This is all scratch built by us. This is all, oh my God, so oh wow. This is so much more than what some of the H-O guys do. We get to buy a kit and glue it together and paint it. You guys have to come up with the whole, I mean how do you scratch build a steam locomotive? So we usually start by researching a prototype so like when I built my Crusader I would go through the any drawings I could find. I talked to the Redding Historical Society and I was looking for any information that I could find on it. I scaled the drawings down to the 146 scale as mentioned and then so I went from there and just found the parts that were available, kind of built up the frame at first and then made sure the motors were working properly and then got all the articulation with the trucks and the stream line. Tell me about the motors. The motors are Legos homegrown motors. What I use is a train motor that's kind of can come in a set and then they also have like the, I guess it's more like the robotic stuff. It's called the Technic line. The Technic sets and the robotic sets have motors that we also adapt to what we want to do. Usually comes to what we want to get out of a locomotive as far as performance goes. So like a Y6B will use a much different setting than like a fast passenger locomotive. I haven't seen a Pensy T1 over there that articulated. You guys really did the research to try to figure out how to make curved bricks and square bricks turn into a train. Now, okay, I'm going to give you trouble on this next part, okay? I understand that it is against your policy to glue anything together. Tell me about that. Is that across, that is timing. My point is if you drop something, you're going to break it. But, why don't you want to glue it together? Because putting it together the second and third time is just as fun. Also, so this is going to be fun. It can be. You're going to be cussing my name. All of these buildings, all of these locomotives, all of these passenger trains, none of this is glued. None of them. No, no two bricks together on this ladder glue. And the other thing about gluing is a lot of our models are evolutionary. They're models built on previous models. We often go back, as new parts come out, we redesign our models to make them better. We tear them apart, you know, as new techniques come about, as we just become better builders in general, we'll take our old models apart. If I joined your club and I glued my stuff together, would you guys throw me out? No, that's your decision. Okay, so it is allowing. We respect people's right to do what they want. It's your model, you can do that. I mean, the forests, the Southern Pacific engines, these buildings, you got to glue this stuff together, guys. Well, we just choose not to. Okay, I'll be done with that. It holds together surprisingly well. It does, and you know, we give each other enough crap as it is, because like, I've built a streamlined K4, and he always yells at me that I built it in the wrong color. Okay. Well guys, what website can they check out to look this up online? We're on Flickr. We're on, our company is brickmodelrarider.com and PenLug also has a website too. It's penlog.org. Yeah, penlog.org. And then texasbrickroad is tbrr.org. Yes, yep. Well, this blows me away. This is a whole new thing for me to get my brain around. But these are every bit prototype modelers as we are. They've just got the handicap of using squares and circles, no soldering iron, no glues. We consider it the Lego to be a model. It's a challenge. I can see it being a challenge, and it's still part of the toy industry, and that's big business. So thank you very much guys for sharing this with us on What's Neat. Have to thank you. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm standing with beautiful Michelle here from the Colorado Railroad Museum, and that's a really nice railroad in Greeley, Colorado, where they have this museum to show off, I'm sure, a lot of narrow gauge, the history of Colorado. And I understand you all have a layout there, Michelle. Please tell us your full name, tell the What's Neat folks about your beautiful museum. Thank you. The Colorado Model Railroad Museum has a 5,500 square foot layout. It is HO scale, but we operate it like the real world completely prototypically down to time. Oh, operate it? Yeah, and it's dispatched, fully dispatched. How many hours is a session? Well, we're open from 10 to four. So we are like a museum for the public, but we operate like a model railroading session. So we kind of blend the two together for the public. That's awesome. So you actually teach them how to operate. Now, what else do you have a beautiful layout? What else do you guys show off there? We have some great artifacts in model railroading, and we have a full-sized Colorado and Southern caboose, and it's beautiful and fully restored, so you can go inside and check it out. It's really unusual that a museum is set up at the NMRA show. Are you finding benefit from being here? Absolutely. It's been interesting. People have heard of us, but not been, so maybe we're helping them come to Colorado and check us out. And some people have been and just been so excited to see us here. They're like, we've been. It's great. Absolutely. This has been a great show for us. That's awesome. And tell us, what website would you want to check out if we're out that way and we want to tour your beautiful place? You want to check out www.cmrm.org. That's for Colorado Model Railroad Museum. That's awesome. I've been watching the video of the layout and this gorgeous calendar here. You guys are doing the right way to promote a business, so good for you. And thank you very much for sharing this gorgeous place with all of our viewers on what's neat. You're very welcome. Thank you. I loved it. I'm with one of my most favorite people in the industry, Doug Blaine of Bachman Trains. And I say that because Doug and I have worked for better than 22 years in this industry. We've both become sort of seasoned together and we've kind of helped each other along the way through that 22 year journey. But Doug is in charge of essentially sales, advertising for Bachman. Just marketing. Just marketing for Bachman. And at Bachman, you're in charge of the marketing and licensing programs at Bachman. It's been a pleasure. It's been a great ride with you over the years as well. I appreciate that. Had a lot of fun. And we've worked on a lot of great projects together. Yes, some of the photographs. I'd love to b-roll some of the stuff I can think in my mind. Well, we actually took the Williams line and took it outside so it looked like the real, real grand passenger train running underneath that bridge in Illinois. That was a winner. We did the one steam engine, the large scale engine, coming across the creek with all these gourds. That scene took every tree in my basement. There's been a lot of projects, a lot of great ones. And the first one I remember was the O-N-30 layout you did when we first introduced the O-N-30 line with Lee Riley. Right. And it was just a beautiful gorgeous scene on a trestle with the fall trees. And it was a thing of beauty. Oh my God, that turned into the very first five part series in the Model Press on O-N-30. Because I had to jump on every other model. Thank you for that, Scoop. It's been a pleasure. It's always been good working with you because you guys manufacture so much product across a diverse market that really tailors the beginners but you can't say that when you look at large scale and you see some of the museum quality models that you come out with. Well, we're always interested in getting people started in the hobby, whether it's in large scale or HO scale, any scale. But we're seeing it here in front of our Thomas line. Oh, I love it, the colors. And that is just a great way to transition kids from playing with wooden trains, plastic trains, and get them into electric trains and graduate them on to become real model railroaders. Right. It's a great stepping stone for everyone in our hobby. Man, Doug Blaine, you are so respected and loved in this industry. And I want to do one thing. And that is this Christmas. Can we follow you guys when you do the White House Christmas tree train? Absolutely. We'll make sure you get footage. All right, we'll get publicity on it somehow and make sure you're included. You're awesome. It'll be a pleasure. You're the best. Doug Blaine from Bachman Industries. Thank you so much. Thanks for visiting us, Ken. And thanks for a great show. Hi, I'm Joshua Barton with What's Need This Week. And I'm here with Denny Yelsma with Yelsma Graphics. How are you today, Denny? Great. I'm great. It's great to be in Kansas City. Oh. Good. Tell me a little bit about these wares here. Okay, well, what we've been doing is we've been making railroad jackets, railroad shirts, caps, you name it. And we do nothing but embroidery and everything is custom. And this here is a Union Pacific Challenger. And we do what I call the exotic railroad jackets where we have a locomotive and then the logo itself. And we put them on jackets. We have different weight jackets. And you name the railroad we have. We right now have 1,205 different railroad logos. Now are these outsourced from China? Oh, no, we personally make them. There's a little lady that runs my machine. She has for years and years. And we do everything. We do the designing, the digitizing. We do everything. We're right here in the good old USA. I love to hear that, Denny. Well, these are absolutely beautiful pieces. So how much would something like this go, about $300, $400? No, these jackets start out at $89 or $79 up to $160, $70. And we also, we do clubs. So the club members out there, if they want a club, we'll make a special pricing for clubs and we'll design their club logos. Wow, that gives me a ton of ideas. I'll tell you again. All right, well, thank you very much, Denny, for talking with us and we'll be hearing from you soon. Do you have a website that people can get to? Yes, very simple. It's yelsma.com. That's J-E-L-S-M-A.com. And we're based out of Jacksonville, Florida and we've been doing this for 33 years. This is our 33rd year. Wow, that's great. Thank you, Denny, for hanging out with me for a few minutes. All right. For this segment of What's Neat, we're in the Woodland Cinex booth with Diana Hormann and she's got a really cool product to talk about. Now you'll remember Woodland Cinex as being the company that makes the scenery products that we all use on our Marrero's pretty much and the lighting system that we featured on a previous What's Neat video. Diana, did I get anybody in trouble when I said somebody needs a raise on that product? You didn't. Okay. I was just trying to get y'all's attention. Now I see you've come with a beautiful water system here at the show. Tell us about this. Yep, the water system is over there. Is that right? The field system is here. So the water system is over there. This is the field system. So I'm supposed to be talking about the field system. Tell us about the field system and then we'll talk about the water system. Let's do that. Okay, so the field system is brand new. It's coming out this fall. And the reason we did, Woodland Cinex did this is because Woodland is always looking for the next big thing to come out with for modelers for realism. And we realized that we're missing tall grasses, things that you're gonna see in a field, in a pasture, in a meadow. So we needed tall grasses. We came up with a new materials called static grass. Okay. Static grass. And you're probably gonna wonder how do you make it stand up or what is it? Okay, how do you make it stand up? Well, we make it stand up with the Static King. The Static King. Static King. Must be any static grass gone? No. Yes, it is. So let me tell you about the static grass and then we'll get to the static king. Okay. Static grass, as you can see in some of these pictures, has, let's do this one. There's four different colors. You know, I love how I feel. I've written your fingers on that. Look at that. Yep. The price is right. Four different colors. And that is different colors. Nice. Yes, four different colors. Four different heights. Let's do this one. Four different heights. Okay. You can see how they blend together. Yes, there it is. Because you know what? Everything is in a manicured golf course. New. So you need something that shows the field. That's along the main line. That's what the static grass is gonna do. But to make it look like this, we're gonna have a static king. Basically, I'm gonna apply some glue. I'm gonna throw the static grass and the static king. I'm gonna turn it over, turn it on. And it causes it to stand upright when it applies. How about that? It's cool. Now, is that a new product that you just announced? Yes, it is. And do you have those at the show or is that something we're gonna see in TrainFest? You will see it at TrainFest. It should be available later this fall for purchase dealers. Everything, all of the dioramas that you see here are the field grasses, the static grass. Another new material called plant hues. Another new one called briar patches. Pretty cool. Also, we have the model vac, which is gonna help keep it clean because you know static grass can be a little messy. Other modeling can. This is designed to pick it up and then reuse it. That's awesome. You guys are a family company. Been around now for decades. And I can tell your enthusiasm for the hobby. You love your job, don't you? I do like my job. I do. It's a great place to work. It's the best hobby in the world, Diana. Thank you so much for sharing the Woodland Scenic's products with us on What's Neat. I'm here now with Ken Patterson. We're doing an on-the-spot interview. We're working. We're working. I know here's your soundbars right there. We're getting an on-the-spot interview. Gotta do it like this. There you go. I'm Campbell Rice, and I'm here with Rob with Z-Track. They're a distributor for AZL. And not a lot out there about Z-Scale. So tell me a little bit about your company here and what you have. Short thing. Z-Track actually started out as a magazine, the only print magazine for Z-Scale model, railroading. We moved into wholesale distribution and represent companies like American Z-Line and Roka Han Track products out of Japan, as well as supported smaller manufacturers. It's really been great. Z-Scales are growing, segment of the hobby. We're getting a lot of new modern rolling stock, locomotive offerings. Just really hitting a niche in the market, you know? It's amazing to me how much the detail has come along on Z-Scale recently, and I have recently inquired a small Z-Scale layout. So it's kind of piqued my interest a little bit. Yeah, it's absolutely amazing because it's one of the few scales in a small space you can model your favorite short line, scene, area, to scale, and do that in a very small space. It's awesome. Really like all the products that you guys have and hope the show was good for you. It was a good show. I mean, we look forward to offering more products and entertain the Malororo community more. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, for this segment of What's Neat, we're standing in front of a T-Track N-Scale layout, and these guys are modular and they've set a new world's record for how many modules are set up at a show. 330 today. So I'm talking to Bruce Arbor here and Vic McTee, and these are both members of this T-Group. In fact, you're involved in the website page and a lot of social media for the group. Tell me about the whole layout here. Well, as he said, yeah. The concept, where did you guys come up with this? Oh well, it came up from Lee Monaco Fitzgerald in Tracker from way back. Actually, wife of Jim Fitzgerald. They went to Japan and saw a concept where they saw, where they were doing some dioramas on poster boards or art boards. Real small. Small, yeah, A4 paper size. And that's the key to this scale is each one of your modules are almost comparable to the size of a painting. So literally, you guys have got 12 by fives, eight by tens, you've got some that are three feet long, and they've all got leg levelers on. Tell us about the standards on that. Well, the standards based on a single, what they call a single, it's a metric because it originated in Japan. But as you can see, people have expanded on that. You can do a double, you can do a triple, you can do a quad, but it's still all based on the measurements of that single. And as you said, the leveling bolts are necessary to be able to level the module from 2.75 inches up to four inches. Nice. That way they can run wires underneath if they have to or account for tables that are quite perfect at that time. Now this track is also standard on this. What kind of track do you use? Well, Kato Unitrack, I guess originated in Japan was the proprietary track. So the standard as it's developed in the U.S. is that you just need Kato Unitrack at the ends because those are both the positive and electrical joins to the module right next to you. So are there guys that mix other track in the middle? Absolutely. And tell me about how many members have you got here set up at this show? How many guests would you've got? Well, we got 60 actual participants bringing 330 modules. 60 people, that's a lot. Yeah, well, not including their spouses and their buddies. But we've got people all the way from Ottawa, Canada, Texas, Texas. We're down from Coastal Alabama, of course, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, lots here in Missouri, Iowa, all over Oklahoma. This is amazing, it's small, it's simple, a beginner could build one of these and set it up with you guys and learn so quickly. It's got to be the best hobby in the world. Tell me about the camaraderie and the fellowship. Oh, it's there, it's great. You get it at high level, kids love it. So you joke around with the kids. And I mean, everybody does that same sort of thing, right? So there's a lot of camaraderie there. Same with just getting together from all parts of the world and working out the same problems. Guys, this is awesome. He's selling himself short. His group in Texas actually does a junior engineer program at all their shows with a smaller T-track layout where they lit, you know, how do these people, kids, stay away, don't touch? No, no, no, no, we invite you. That's amazing, that is so the opposite of so many modular clubs where they put up the big ropes and say, stand back. You guys, you want people to get touched and feel and be part of it. Absolutely, that's awesome. You need to go down and see, you need to go see Faye Chin's layout out of here if you want to get a good idea of the touch, see what it's all about. Try this, see what this does. Which modules are hers? Faye, actually Faye Chin. Yeah, he's over here, just about 20 feet away. I'll run B-roll footage of these as you talk. What are these modules that we're looking at? Faye's got his own separate situation, his own inner loop running off the main branch, but he's got a lot of proactive buttons that you can push that operate this and that. So the kids get to touch it, the vascular bridges go up and down. A dump truck dumps its load, that type of thing. Literally inviting, please touch, please touch. This is exciting, this is doable, this is attainable, this is the beauty of this hobby and you're doing it in end scale guys. Thank you very much for both of you, for sharing this with us and the viewers of What's Neat. Ken, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm standing here with Craig Martin and Craig Martin is one of our favorite manufacturers. When you had BLMA models, Craig, you were young, you were astute, aggressive and you showed a lot of the older folks in the room how to run a model building company. But now you're kind of retired for that since selling your company to Atlas, but you're still at the show today for filling your contract. Tell me, how have you been and tell me about your business card deal, tell us where you've been all this time. Okay, so yeah, very quickly. And I appreciate all that, man. I've been good. I love you, man. I've been good, it's good to see you. What have I been doing? So I had the other metal business card business, I've been very busy with that. And it's funny, because people ask me do I miss the model train business? I do because I miss tinkering with stuff, but I get my fulfill of that from, yeah, here's one of the metal business cards. From this business, right? Because this is manufacturing, it's all the stuff that kind of went into model trains in a different field, bigger market, different market, a much different business. Different model. That model trains, but. But I know you've got a passion for trains. You always have. Oh yeah. Now you're probably not getting as much time to model now running this business. No. Tell us how do you fulfill your passion for trains? So we've been out here at Santa Fe Junction here. Three days in a row, I mean, it's epic. So off-roading in the desert, watching trains, whenever I off-road, it's always next to a train track. So you're still a rail fan. Oh, I love, yeah, that's how I get my fulfillment. And I have my friends back home that have layouts. And I run trains and have fun and work on the business and enjoy time with my wife and my dog and try to keep it simple, you know? Now that's awesome. And you're still young, I would want to ask one more question. Sure. Have you ever considered possibly getting back into the monorail industry as a manufacturer? Have you thought of other ideas? It's a good question. I can't do to my contract for a while. But I really, I sit on the sidelines and I really appreciate what some companies are doing to innovate stuff. I think if I was to ever do it, it would be an innovative type, something or other that changes the game in some way. But I haven't quite thought about it, but I'll be honest, I enjoy watching your videos. I enjoy seeing all my friends here and just having fun in this industry from this side of it, right? That's why we love you, Craig, man. You're the best. Thank you very much for a few minutes, guys. Hey, appreciate it. All of the model railroad products seen in this episode of What's Neat are available through Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado or order online at mycaboose.com.