Large Scale Central

Train Mountain Today

If your not familiar with Train Mountain here is there web site.

We drove over today with some friends and spent several fun hours enjoying all the activity.
If I understood one of the Docents correctly they had people from 44 states and 15 countries attending
( that’s running trains) at this years Tri-Annual event.
The Tri-Annual is a week long ( 9 days I think) event of fun, train riding, camping and catching up with friends in the hobby.

A few random pictures of the activities that caught my eye are below.

The unloading tracks.

The Vendors area.

Another of the unloading tracks

Steamers always catch my interest.

A train ride getting ready to depart.

Another cool steamer.

And who can resist a Goose?

The turntable with, I think they said 95 leads.

Another TT shot.

A couple of shots of the coaling yards.

Industries along the line

From the back of the unloading bays.

If you ever have the chance don’t miss attending a Tri-Annual even if it is just for a day or two.

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Rick,
Glad you could make it. After last summers trip, we stopped by Train Mountain as well and got a pretty good 3-4 hour tour of the place and a decently long train ride as well that covered the lower portion of the property. I really want to go back during one of the operations week events! I think you’d like that too!

TM is definitely a bucket list place for ride on trains.

Craig,

This is truly amazing! I had no idea how many people were in this extreme end of the large scale hobby! Even if this is a fraction of the total participants, given the investment in terms of cash and skill obtainment, it is pretty remarkable!

Eric

Looks fantastic Rick, thanks for the photos. The unloading area transfer table looks interesting, I’ll guess it slides the loco to wherever your pickup is parked?

Great report. I was there in 2019 with the garden RR convention. Never did find the alleged gauge one layout…

Jerry

The G layout is way down the hill near the overflow camping and parking areas. Hard to find unless you know where to look.

It is a huge layout but not very well maintained, in my opinion, but they don’t really seem to have enough interested help in G scale at this ride on oriented venue.

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I’ll try and throw together a photo album of photos from TM from our visit last summer. Apparently there’s quite the connection between TM and Kitsap Live Steamers which I live about a mile from. Some of the people are on both board of directors kinda thing to dual membership. My wife keeps saying I should get involved at Kitsap but I say no because I know the slippery slope that it leads to but maybe I should just to get someone I know that goes to TM for the operation week.

Speaking of ride on stuff, a former co worker from the RR days is starting up a ride on train in Ellensburg over on the other side of the state. They are planning on doing train rides but also operations on a city park area. They are still in beginner stages of that layout.

Okay, here’s a few hundred photos mostly from my wife! I was too excited to take many pictures. Michelle said I had a big smile on my face the entire time. Click the photo and it should open the album.
Google Photos

To give you a scale of how big the place is, the ride from the terminal area to the furthest point on the line takes 4 hours of running at 8-10 mph… There is a small group that does catered lunches out and back. We wished we knew about that but with our large group of 18 people we instead got a “school tour” that I helped set up.

Next door and connected to the TM track is a “smaller” group that gives public rides.

Yes, it’s a transfer table. There’s a video of an unloading operation - try YouTube.

That’s remarkable! Thanks for sharing the album!

Eric

Well I might have started down the slippery slope of ride on trains. I found a TM Facebook group for people participating at TM, not just the “hey we are TM” group. I’ve already seen quite a few “hey I’m attending the triannual and don’t have a train” type of posts.

Am I seeing a 7.5 scale T&M feed complex in your future, and Some Gp& boxcars???