On Saturday, August 24th I visited the Silicon Valley Lines HO Scale layout in downtown San Jose. I have wanted to visit this layout for some time but somehow never had gotten around to it until now. A few weeks ago I received an announcement for an open operating session and signed up.
This club alternates between modern and transition eras which they define as being after or before the start of Amtrak in 1971. For this session they were in the transition era.
This layout is using plenty of technology, some of which is new to me. It was all DCC using the NCE system with boosters and many power districts. They are also using LCC for some of their turnout and signal controls. The layout is almost fully signaled.
What was different was the fact that some of the operators were remote. A couple of the trains running had camera cars in front of the locomotive so the remote operator could see where they were going. I was told that one of these remote operators was in the UK and that the dispatcher was in New York. On one of my jobs I even made an opposing meet at a siding with one of the remotes.
During my visit I ran three jobs. First was a short freight train using a pair of Santa Fe GP7's in zebra stripe as power. Next was a longer passenger train that ran over most of the layout. As I was using my phone as a throttle, I did not get any photos while running but below is a photo of the passenger train's power that I took at the end of the run. This club uses Chicago & Northwestern colors as the home road, removing the C&NW logo and adding their own SVL decals. Both of these sets of locomotives had sound decoders and both runs went really well.
The third job I ran was to take 9 cars from Bayshore yard and load the car float with them. While the first two jobs were on the main line with signals and turnouts under dispatcher control, this train was a local on a secondary line so I also controlled the turnouts. In several places such as this around the layout there are small touch screen computers mounted with track diagrams programmed into them. This was something else that I've seen in videos but had never used before. I soon got the hang of it though.
It was a fun time and good to meet some modelers from another scale in our area. The members here were quite welcoming and helpful to guest operators such as myself. This club has a website, it's at https://siliconvalleylines.com/ There is also a professionally done TSG Multimedia video about this layout on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeoH92UYrrg
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