Have you been to a National Convention before… no me neither but I have been to two regional conventions now and whilst they are awesome I wanted to come and check out the ultimate Model Railroad week.

So what about the venue, well in 2017 the convention is in Orlando, Florida on International Drive, you can’t get more going on in one small space unless it was in Las Vegas and I don’t think anyone could afford that. So theres lots to do and lots for familys to do, but what about the train part of this.

Well when I registered I was given a bag, yes a sholder bag no less, full of information about the local area, future events and the most important part of the bag was the convention timetable.

So i must have seen 90% of people who have clearly been here before and know the drill, studying the timetable and reading the changes. Highlighters came out but for those of us not quite as prepared the organisers supplied a pen. So i started marking off what i was planning to attend, basically from Sunday through Saturday the programme is packed with none stop clinics, workshops, tours, socials and much much more. The week is going to be topped off with the National Train Show which takes place from Friday until Sunday.

Clinics

So at 1:30pm the clinics started, I decided more because I knew nothing about them at all to attend the ardunio clinic, the very very basics and thankfully it was exactly what it said on the tin. Thanks to Tom Gordon, for a clinic aimed firmly at those of us with no clue what an Ardunio was or that there were so many types and so many different bits of hardware, thankfully he saved us from the challenge of Coding, but there i a clinic on that later in the week.

Modelling with the Masters – Scenery by the Sqft

I have to thank Kathy Millat for recommending these clinics to me, I have done scenery before of course but there are always new tips and tricks we can get from working on a project together. So the first of these clinics was led by Peter Youngblood MMR. This two part clinic on scenery should result in something that looks like this.

So that is what we are aiming for and this is what you start with:

Now i can’t describe step by step how I worked through the steps to construct the scene shown above but I took a series of photographs below that show how I got from a pile of bits to the end of the first build session.

We finished this clinic at 11pm so that really was the end of Day 1.