johnwhelan
Well-known member
In theory it should have been a ten minute walk from the station to the show. Unfortunately I was misdirected as to which exit was east at the station by a VIA rail employee and it took me about an hour of walking through the rain to find the show. I got to see lots of parts of Montreal I'd never seen before including bits of China town and to practice my French when car drivers would pull up and ask me the way to .... I perfected the famous Parisian style shrug of the shoulders.
I was interested in seeing the reactions to Trackplate's GWR 1892 route and the Broad Gauge rolling stock once we had it running on TRS2006 under Vista. On the 1 gig memory laptop with TC it simply crashed the machine. RickySkye's Firefly got quite a warm reaction from at least one small boy as he made it go faster with the mouse, my Romulus wasn't nearly as colourful or interesting. There were a number of comments about the country side displayed on the layout including the steam road tractor. I had an interesting natter with a retired IBM mainframe programmer and we talked about the amount of processing power required to display the moving Trains.
Looking at the amount of dust on the HO layout and knowing how many problems dust had caused me in the past made me think we have it easy and to some extent much cheaper as well. One second hand steam loco was for sale for only $450, there was a cheaper one going for $250. After I saw those prices I stopped looking.
Around lunch time I felt the need to find a reasonable cup of coffee and to have a comfortable sit down. By the time small boys sat on the chair to run the locos I found myself on my feet a bit too much, especially as I'd walked through 30 minutes of rain in Ottawa to get to the station on time, Ottawa local buses don't start early on Saturday. So I descended the very long flight of stairs that led to the show and set off in search of a comfortable chair and a cup of coffee. Needless to say I should have taken a compass with me to Montreal. I descended into a Mall beneath the streets with my sense of direction this was possibly a mistake. Apparently Montreal has the largest underground interconnected set of Malls in Canada. With most signs in French I must confess when I eventually saw a sign for the Gare Central I thought it more prudent to simply go that way so at least I could be certain to catch my 6 pm train home.
Cheerio John
I was interested in seeing the reactions to Trackplate's GWR 1892 route and the Broad Gauge rolling stock once we had it running on TRS2006 under Vista. On the 1 gig memory laptop with TC it simply crashed the machine. RickySkye's Firefly got quite a warm reaction from at least one small boy as he made it go faster with the mouse, my Romulus wasn't nearly as colourful or interesting. There were a number of comments about the country side displayed on the layout including the steam road tractor. I had an interesting natter with a retired IBM mainframe programmer and we talked about the amount of processing power required to display the moving Trains.
Looking at the amount of dust on the HO layout and knowing how many problems dust had caused me in the past made me think we have it easy and to some extent much cheaper as well. One second hand steam loco was for sale for only $450, there was a cheaper one going for $250. After I saw those prices I stopped looking.
Around lunch time I felt the need to find a reasonable cup of coffee and to have a comfortable sit down. By the time small boys sat on the chair to run the locos I found myself on my feet a bit too much, especially as I'd walked through 30 minutes of rain in Ottawa to get to the station on time, Ottawa local buses don't start early on Saturday. So I descended the very long flight of stairs that led to the show and set off in search of a comfortable chair and a cup of coffee. Needless to say I should have taken a compass with me to Montreal. I descended into a Mall beneath the streets with my sense of direction this was possibly a mistake. Apparently Montreal has the largest underground interconnected set of Malls in Canada. With most signs in French I must confess when I eventually saw a sign for the Gare Central I thought it more prudent to simply go that way so at least I could be certain to catch my 6 pm train home.
Cheerio John