Model Railroad Museum Visit

Today I took my two kids to the Model Railroad Museum for a visit. It's one of my favorite places in San Diego. While on a trip to one of the local electronics stores a couple of months ago, I had bought a few small kits that make train sounds. At the museum, we were shown a model train layout that had a guy painting up a billboard. I thought that it might be a neat idea to try to place the railroad noises circuit in an Altoids tin, and use the Altoids tin as a billboard or side of a building in our model train layout at home.

Here's a photo of some of the club members that set up the layouts in the model railroad museum:



I'm kicking around the idea of making the model railroad layout at home be Amateur Radio Themed. Stuff like HRO boxcars, antennas, and field day parties all modeled in miniature.

There is a very interesting thing in model railroad circles. It's very similar to a QSL card and is called a Rail Pass. A good introduction to the concept of a rail pass can be found here.

Essentially, if you are a railroad modeler, you have a cool little paper (or electronic) pass that has your train layout on the back and information on the front. It's essentially a record of a visit, or contact, and seems to me to be very similar to a QSL card.

Here is an example of a model railroad railpass.