CP St. Lawrence Division

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(virtual tours start at 8am ET, 22 October, 2022)

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DESCRIP-
TION
This HO layout was designed for operation and is point to point. The town names were chosen to reflect a geographical relationship, but no attempt was made to duplicate any aspect of any part of the real world.

With 8 towns and limited space between towns the focus is on local switching, using switch lists generated by Shipit! There are several passenger trains that have been recently added to make the operations more interesting. Alex used an interesting event based scheduling system that he called his flip clock because it was originally conceived and put into service as a series of small pieces of paper that were flipped to reveal the next work to be done. This flip clock was eventually brought into the computer age by using a PowerPoint presentation where each slide represents one of these pieces of paper. The presentation is shared across several small tablets in each town to give a local schedule board.

The scenery on Alex's layout is finished and detailed. The overall effect is excellent, but does not distract from the
operation.

Sadly, Alex left us abruptly this year and the layout will be dismantled.
SCALEHOSCENERY
FINISHED %
100
SIZE22 x 24 feet - around the wall with two peninsulasPOWERDigitrax DCC
OPER-
ATIONS
YesOPERATING
SYSTEM
Switch lists (ShipIt! software)
LOCALESouthern-Eastern Ontario (freelanced)ERA1990s
FEATURESOperations based on a unique computerized “flip clock” that describes the operations to be completed in each 30 minute segment of the operating “day”.

self-guided tour of model train layouts