Gentlemen,
I thought you'd enjoy a quick note on yesterday's RPM
Meet in St. Louis.
I'm happy to report that we had 89 attendees from the
local area and around the country. We were
disappointed that several vendors and historical
societies dropped out at the last minute, but we think
we had a very good initial meet. The purpose of this
meet was to test the response in the area, and
obviously the response was good. With this in mind,
Dave Davis and I are already planning next year's
meet, which will most likely be around the same time
of year (late August) but we'll host it in the St.
Louis metro area instead of in the 'burbs.
Local notables included Ed Hawkins, Pat Wider, Jack
Spencer, Dave Davis, Brad Joseph, John Welther and the
elusive Mike Budde. Mike brought about 200 freight
cars, including dozens of spectacular auto racks, each
with a full compliment of shining 60's-era autos. Dave
Davis brought huge modules (from his GMR articles) and
Vic Smith brought his modules that were featured in MR
a few years ago. The FreeMo guys were there in full
force, and we anticipate we'll have a nice FreeMo
layout operating at next year's meet. Chris
Theis--what a guy--has the lead on FreeMo in the area
and it's going to take off after this meet. Quite a
few lone wolves showed up too--just too many to
mention. John Lee (Badger), John Hitzeman (AMB), Dave
Lotz (Q Connection) and Dan Kohlberg propped up the
whole event and are really terrific guys. Even Ken
Patterson made a cameo appearance.
We had quite a few notables from out of town as well.
Andy Harmon and Mike Dudley came from the Cincinnatti
area; Andy displayed three tables with complete NYC
passenger and N&W freight trains as well as numerous
other diesels, and Mike displayed some gorgeous
scratchbuilt NYC cars. Stu Thayer came from Colorado
Springs with A LOT of neat L&N stuff, and Stu's
brother Bill came from Carthage MO with large scale
models. Ben Hom came out from the DC area with a
beautiful PRR steam-era freight car display. Last but
not least with Chuck Dean, who flew his peronsal
airplane up from Louisville and brought all kinds of
goodies with him.
The clinics were well received although we had a few
technical glitches that forced some delays. I'm going
to write up a meet report for RMC will expand on some
of the other problems we had, plus write a "how to"
article for presenting RPM meets. This type of event
is clearly the wave of the future.
The bottom line to the meet was that we got everybody
together to have a good time and talk trains. The key
to this kind of meet is not a train show or swap meet,
but rather a forum where we can all get together and
talk to each other. We accomplished that. There's just
no way to thank everyone--in some way, everyone who
helped and showed up played a part in making the meet
a success. Thanks to David Jobe, Dave Davis, Ed
Hawkins and Loren Casey for making this thing happen.
There were lots of guys taking pictures, so I'll try
and post some of them as soon as I catch my breath.
And now...off to mow the yard.
John
John Golden
O'Fallon, IL
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