NMRC,
The Nottawasaga Model Railroad Club,
Meets In Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

There are photos and mentions of the Nottawasaga Model Railroad Club (NMRC) and its members scattered throughout this website. That's because I'm a member and lots of what I write about involves the goings-on at the NMRC club.

I thought it would be advisable to give the club its own page so I can use it as a pointer to help you find information on my site that may be of use to you.

We meet Monday evenings between 7 and 10 pm in a portable building behind the United Church on Golf Course Road on the eastern side of Wasaga Beach. Wasaga Beach is about 2 hours north of Toronto, Canada on the shores of Georgian Bay. To orient you, it's about 45 minutes west of Barrie, Ontario from the major 400 highway.

We currently (Jan, 2010) have 15 active members. The Club builds and owns a modular layout that we take to train shows throughout central Ontario. The layout, when set up, is a 26 foot long by 5 foot wide peninsula that widens to 6 feet at both ends to allow the track to curve back. At the clubhouse we are also building additional modules to free-mo standards that splice into the midpoint of the layout. Thus far we have not taken the free-mo units "on the road". This month we completed upgrading the layout's wiring for DCC Digitrax to be compatible with free-mo standards. We'll be "beta" testing the DCC at the Barrie Train Show in a few weeks.

Below are listed some of the pages where you'll find more information about the NMRC layout. The layout also appears in a few of the videos taken at Barrie, Brampton and the Midland train shows. I'll post more videos here in the future. Stay tuned by subscribing to my RSS feed so you are alerted when there's something new here.

Like most clubs, we're always interested in new members. If you live in the region and would like to learn more, send me an email from my comments page.

NMRC display at the
2009 Barrie Train Show

Here are a few photos that appear on other pages. New photos of the NMRC layout will be posted here in future.

*TH&B freight cars passing*

*CP freight on the mainline*

Here's the schematic of the current permanent layout that has more modules than the ones we take to the train shows.

*Club layout schematic (not to scale)*

Here's a short video shot at the Barrie Train Show, February 2010, featuring lots of steam and diesels and Brad's CN snowplow. This was the first time we'd used DCC since converting the layout from DC and installing Digitrax. Most members brought a couple of engines to run on the layout. We'd never had so many going at the same time now that there were no more block toggles to throw. We could have used a dispatcher! We like to let children switch cars on the inside trackage while our members run trains on the outside main. We were a little concerned that youngsters would have trouble running trains with DCC but they picked it up right away, even a 4-year old! It's the older guys that are slow to learn. Need to play more video games or practice on a Wii! In the background you can hear some of our members teaching the kids how to switch the cars. You should have seen the smiles.