Oktobahnfest 2024

This week, the North Shore model railroaders came by to check on progress at Pembroke. Our organizer, Graham, holds an annual gathering of the North Shore in December that he calls Trains and Scones. So, my Darling Wife and I decided we needed a theme for our own, which was in October for the second time. Hallowe’en was too obvious, but I thought Oktoberfest (which always seemed to happen at the end of September when I lived in Waterloo Ontario, where it was celebrated passionately) might be a good theme.

Because we’re looking at trains, I renamed it Oktobahnfest. There were home-made pretzels and Bavarian-style lager to support the theme, and eight members of the group came to see the layout. They all seemed to enjoy the evening of chatter and 1120 ran down to the junction and back, derailing less often than the last time I showed the layout, so we’ll call that a win. The new water tower was the star of the show, and folks are finally starting to understand that it’s 1905 and there are no buttons to push, but there are levers to lift and chains to pull.

With the railroad was in decent shape – no rails missing and at least one engine in steam and the cobwebs collected from over the pasture – I invited our neighbours to check on progress today. The energy level with six or eight kids under 11, their parents, and half-a-dozen empty-nesters in the room was Formula 1 to the North Shore Model Railroaders’ PGA. At one time there were three boys on one step stool hanging onto the edge of the Muskrat River as a sister standing on an office chair drove the train under their noses.

The train ran down to Golden Lake and back several times, each with a different engineer standing on an unsafe piece of furniture to augment their height. I learned that the presence of registers at Golden Lake and Pembroke means you must be able to write your name if you are to run a train, that nothing makes you want to run a train more than seeing your little sister run one, and that I should have done this years ago.