The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.
2022-01-01 - Happy New Year
Category RandallHappy New Year 2022 from the Randall Museum Model Railroad team.
2021 was yet another odd year. It was marked by the museum reopening in October. The usual lot of mandatory layout maintenance happened with various things to fix (B91, B320, B321, T150, T320, T450, etc). Some new stuff happened like balloon auto-reversers for Bridgeport yard, and a good amount of time spent understanding the lighting.
Also on the new stuff side, the year was mostly consumed by the Train Vision project on which I spent many “invisible” months working at home before installing it at the museum, followed by a lot of fine tuning.
I’ve also done a lot of computer maintenance. With the lockdown, I’ve grown more used to doing remote maintenance. New software development like Vision happens all at home and takes a lot of my spare time, as do remote network/computer maintenance. The issue with this is that the amount of work is not tangible to the untrained eye, and I then get some apathetic comments focusing on what has not visibly been done rather than all the preventive maintenance or home development time that has been done. That was highly demoralizing and also marked a personally depressing ending to the year.