During my high school years, I turned an early interest in microcomputers into an after-school job. As pretty much the go-to programmer for the Grand Rapids Urban League, I turned that job over to my brother Bob when I went off to school. During those years I accepted a job at Stan’s Roundhouse where I sold model trains on weeknights and weekends.
A work-study position at the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching gave me early access to the Internet, about ten years before the general public got onto it. Most importantly, it introduced me to M-Net, a little BBS run by Mike Myers in the Ann Arbor area. Mike was working with a programmer, Marcus Watts, to try selling a Unix-based BBS-system to companies to use in-house and for technical support. I took a role in promoting his dial up BBS, including placing a notice in Model Railroader. We got a whopping two new members from that effort. Dial-up (only) access and long-distance bills were a big factor here.
Mike had gone through a model railroad phase, and still had a nicely-detailed HO model railroad on benchwork running around the living room of his condominium, the Petoskey, Boyne Falls and Gaylord. Being familiar with the prototype Boyne City, Gaylord and Alpena, this road felt very familiar to me. He regularly ran on a local model railroad known as the Ann Arbor Great Northern. The AAGN ran alternate Tuesday nights in the basement of its owner’s home. Its owner was local ear, nose and throat surgeon, Dr. Jerry Butler.
It was on the AAGN that I got my first taste of operation. Little did I know where that was to lead me.
One Tuesday night in what had to have been mid-November 1984, I accompanied Mike to one of the AAGN operating sessions. That session followed a soon-to-be familiar pattern- every attendee would take a position in one of about 9 towns spread around a 40 by 40-foot basement and switch out every outbound car into a road train drawn by road power. When the train was ready to depart, the local switching power would tie a caboose on an outbound train, and give it its road power. The local crew would notify the Dispatcher, then the Dispatcher would perform his computer-aided magic.
The central piece of the AAGN was its Apple ][, interfaced to a relay board which threw switches and engaged power on the “outbound” track of a selected town. This was ten years before digital command control began to make itself known, so any train that ran was controlled like any simple train set locomotive, by voltage applied to the rails from a rheostat at the Dispatcher’s side.
As Dispatcher, Dr. Butler would run the outbound freight to a six-track receiving yard at Northtown where a hump engine (generally a cow-and-calf set) would take the cars from the train and push them to the top of the hump. At the peak of the hump, the hump crew would select one of twelve tracks using a selector similar to the buttons on a car radio and sort the car onto a designated track. Slowing down the cars was by draggung the card card against the car’s roof to slow it down.
Once a track was full, the Departure Yardmaster would pull the cars on the track to the Departure Yard where he’d restore the road power and caboose. After making certain that the train’s paperwork was all in order, he would call the Dispatcher to use the computer to take the train to where it would be delivered to be switched inbound by its local crews as its third part of the session. When each town has completed switching the inbound cars, the session ends.
After running on the AAGN for the first time, we struck up a conversation with Skip McDonald who had a regular position running the receiving yard that took incoming trains and prepared them to be sorted on the Northtown hump. After the session, Skip invited us to see his Mackinaw and Western layout. Skip was to play a big role in my hobby. More on that next time.
-fm