Bruce Petrarca It is holiday time: Thanksgiving, the year-end holidays, spring break. That also brings out our open houses for PCMRC. We schedule open houses around holidays because that’s when folks tend to visit Arizona. We have just come off our first two for this season. One on Black Friday and the other on Boxing…
Mark Pelletier Plan now to visit the PebbleCreek Model Railroad Club for our annual Thanksgiving Open House at the Eagle’s Nest Activity Center, Friday, November 24, from 10:00 a.m. to noon. Bring the famila, friends and guests to see our indoor and outdoor trains. Inside Room 106, view the superbly detailed Great Lakes Western Railroad,…
Mark Pelletier The PebbleCreek Model Railroad Club has two special people to thank this month and, coincidentally, they are both named Johnson. Thanks first to resident Michael Johnson for his generous donation of a pristine, classic Lionel model train set. You may have seen this train under the Christmas tree at the Creative Arts Center…
Mark Pelletier The Great Lakes Western Railroad – PebbleCreek Club’s model train layout – is prominently covered in the October issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist. MRH is a web-based national magazine serving the model railroad hobby – and it’s free! The magazine is available for anyone worldwide to view online on the web at their…
Mark Pelletier Every month at the end of these articles we tell you that we are “workin’ on the railroad” on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But work is always going on around the Great Lakes Western Railroad. As you can see, a team of three men is busy painting the roof of the unloading shed at…
Mark Pelletier PebbleCreek Model Railroad Club member and President Bruce Petrarca has earned the title of Master Model Railroader (MMR) as designated by the National Model Railroad Association’s Achievement Program. Bruce is the 574th person to achieve this status in the 55 years since the program began. The process to achieve the MMR is somewhat…
Mark Pelletier That’s a question we get all the time from visitors to our model railroad layout. To folks not involved with the hobby, it seems surprising that there must be so many companies making all the various items you see which make up a model railroad. But there are; although manufacturers come and go,…
Mark Pelletier Our members certainly like to play with our trains. But another thing we enjoy just as much is sharing our model displays with PebbleCreek residents and guests. On the recent Good Friday, close to 200 visitors came to view our three train layouts. The outdoor Garden Scale trains are the first to get…
Mark Pelletier and Chuck Weart Although indeed our club members consider any time to be railroad time, this month we’ll talk about the historical effect which railroads had on timekeeping and railroad time which led to the time zones we have today. Years ago, people’s lives took place in a small area and distant activities…
Mark Pelletier Visiting our scale model railroad layout is like entering a time warp. Walk through the doors and it’s around 1960 again. Setting our Great Lakes Western Railroad in that era defines the kind of equipment and scenery you will see. Most major railroads substantially completed the transition from steam locomotives to diesels in…