Happy 4th of July to all!
Due to the holiday, attendance was pretty low; only Jeff and Alvar showed up. Jeff continued to wire the ROM, and now it's well over 1/2 done. When Alvar arrived, both he and Jeff put 8 carriage bolts on the new tower in order to hold together the old floor and the new desk areas.

Jeff and John Purbrick worked on restoring John's throttle that uses a cordless telephone. As in Building 20, this will provide walk-around control. Operation of a train under System control by Freshman Open House is deemed a realizable goal. John and James did additional checking work on the switch control cards, which are about to go to a PC board house. John M continued his work on roundhouse restoration by permanently placing the foundations for the rear walls. Joe Onorato has found some flooring material that is a perfect match for the existing flooring. This will be a great help. Alvar worked on the flooring and inspection pits of the trolley car barn to create a unit that can be transplanted to the new lyout. He also cut a large piece of plywood John Shriver will work on (out of place) to install girder rail for the in-street portions of the new trolley system.

Bill Onorato continued work on a building in the far east side of P-Yard, next the east bridge of Gifford City. John Shriver finished Alvar's work with the trolley car barn by fully removing the base plate of the carbarn, which will make installation in the new layout a lot easier.

Alvar finished the work on the Gifford City structure. The Gifford City structure is now 100% complete! It is now time for scenery to start appearing in the city...

John Purbrick continued working on the switch cards. He also showed the members present a prototype 'bar code reader' which reads barcodes in the bottom of the trucks of cars in order to identify them individually.

A list of all tmrc members since 1946 has been added to the site. We have had almost 750 members since then!

Jeff and Alvar worked on design issues surrounding the construction of a scale replica of the Green Building. Alvar also added some wires to the System ROM. John M continued his work on roundhouse restoration. Andy Miller did initial painting on the Club's recently acquired Proto2000 E8-A/B set.

James fixed a few errors found in the Switch Card, pointed out last week by John Purbrick. Since a few errors were found it was decided that a little more time will be invested in checking the card design before sending it to the manufacturer.

Jeff continued to work hard on the ROM. He is now completly finished with 3 of 4 sections, and half way through the other one, which means that the ROM is now 87.5% complete!!! It won't be long before the ROM is all finished. Jeff, James, and Alvar then worked together to label all the track and frog feeders under the layout to make the next job easier...

Alvar and James worked on what is needed after the ROM is complete: track feeders. Currently there are short 24ga track feeders from the track to terminal strips (installed by John Purbrick). What James and Alvar Started was the addition of 14ga (to minimize voltage drop) from those terminal strips to the distribution panels.

Jeff Birkner continued his work on the System ROM, which is 92.5% done. Andy Miller did some painting. All present gave various parts of the "TMRC Tour" to visitors from the Toronto area, Tom (father) and Dave (son) Crawford. Several small projects were also undertaken. Also, about 3 hours of work were put into the switch card. Since a few problems were encountered about two weeks ago we decided to slow down a little and make completely sure that it will work exactly as planned, since it will be a very large investment. Still, we believe we are in the final version, with only the final test missing: checking each and every connection in the board layout with that of the circuit design.

The ROM is FINISHED! Jeff worked hard for over 4 hours, and by the end of the night (before midnight :-), the ROM was completely done. Next step is to test it... we'll see what happens then. Thank you Jeff!

James and Jeff printed out transparencies of the SwitchBoard cards last Wednesday dawn, and they were up for review this past Saturday. Today the cards were declared done by both James and John Purbrick, so they will go out to a manufacturer within the week!

Alvar, with help from James, dedicated the night to making sure all the hard work by John Purbrick of putting the track feeders was fully labelled and then used Jeff's staple gun to staple all the wires neatly under the layout.

James Knight and Alvar Saenz-Otero continued their work on making the under-layout wiring neater. They are running wires in right-angle arrangements and stapling them to the underside of the layout with telephone staple guns lent by Jeff Birkner. (Large wires like power feeders remain in bundles run through D-rings. The wires discussed here are the wiring to frogs, etc.) John McNamara continued his work on roundhouse restoration. He is extending the roundhouse stall subflooring in the stalls that have been lengthened. This will be followed by installation of brick/block paper to form the final flooring consistent with the existing flooring. Andy Miller painted the E-8 B unit, repaired a TMRC boxcar, and started painting the stone block sheeting that will form a major wall alongside the P-yard approach tracks.