Welcome to the 80th annual National Model Railroad Association convention in Portland, Oregon!

This mobile-friendly web site will be updated each evening with the changes for the next day to help you plan your day.

A complete list of changes is always available on the Activity Changes Page.

Changes for Sunday, August 23rd.

 

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Clinic: Micro Macro Modularity: using the modular concept in layout design

Sunday, 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm, Mt Hood
Moved to new Time: Wednesday, 11:00 am to Noon, Weidler

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Clinic: Your host club: The Columbia Gorge

Sunday, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm, Weidler
Cancelled

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Clinic: Creating a Scene from Start to Finish

Sunday, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm, Weidler
New

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For those of you who may not be able to attend the convention all week, we will once again have Day Fares available for each of the days. More information here.

The Online Company Store that has been selling convention merchandise, shirts, cars, etc., will be closed tomorrow, Wednesday, August 19th at Noon, to allow time to get all of the orders through the system. After that time, all of the items will be available at the Company Store at the convention.

There is now a special two day weekend registration for the Friday and Saturday convention participation as well as a full weekend (Friday through Sunday) of unlimited access to the National Train Show.

Self-guided Layout Tours will be available again this year at Portland.

Booklets with directions will be sold at the Registration Desk for separate days, at $15 per day, and each booklet will be good for up to four people in one car.

Daily self-guided tours will be of the same layouts offered on that day with the bus tours but will not include all layouts. If the bus tour is in the morning, then the self-guided tour will be in the afternoon and vice versa.

Please respect the layout opening times as printed in the booklets and do not try to visit at other times.

A listing of some of the layouts open for self-guided tours is posted on the web page.

The Friday Symphony in the Park tour has been cancelled due to a scheduling problem.

As an alternative for that evening, we have uncovered an interesting ethnic food fair in downtown Portland that runs all day and evening Thursday, Friday, and Saturday which may interest you, The 24th Annual Festa Italiana Portland. Celebrating Italian American culture, it features nonstop entertainment, food, wine/beer gardens, raffle and more.... We had proposed this as a replacement bus tour, but there was not enough interest to make it happen, so we are providing you the details and directions and you can make your own way to the event if you wish.

It is located downtown in Portland's Pioneer Couthouse Square, which is just a quick ride away from the convention hotel on MAX Light Rail, which stops right at the square. We will have directions available at the convention.

This has the makings of a very low cost evening out, as the only costs are the MAX ticket and whatever food you buy at the event.

The fares for the Light Rail are $1.00 for ages 65+, $2.50 for ages 18-64, and $1.25 for ages 7-17. More information including custom directions can be found on our Transit web page and on the TRIMET web site.

We want to welcome you to Portland and make sure that you get off to a good start by helping you get to your hotel quickly once you have arrived.

Greeters will be at the Portland Airport and at the Amtrak Union Station on Saturday August 22nd, and Sunday August 23rd to help you get to your hotel.

Preregistration for the Portland convention and its tours has been closed so that NMRA staff can organize the pre-registration packages and have everything ready for opening day. Only online sales of Merchandise, (cars, shirts, etc.) is continuing through our Merchandise Page.

Pre-Registration will open for pickup on Saturday, August 22 from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM, and continue on Sunday, August 23 starting at 7:00 AM when on-site registration will also open. Registration will continue daily until Friday. This will allow registration ahead of any activities. If you haven't registered, that's not a problem. All tours that were available when the on-line registration function was closed, will be available on site of a first-come, first served basis just as they have been on-line in recent months.

We have a great convention organized and waiting for you, so please come to Portland and join us for all or part of the convention week.

Doug Auburg
Chairman
NMRA 2015 Portland

After living with our web sites being up and down like a yo-yo for the past week, I was finally able to move everything over to my personal web site as an alternate so that we all can resume using the web sites as the convention approaches. The hosting company, Arvixe, has been very reluctant to give us any details of what is happening, but based on a couple of comments, it seems like the machine we are on is so grossly overloaded, that it simply cannot handle the load. How a company can let a machine get into this state is beyond me, but that seems to be their explanation, as best as I can decipher what they told me.

The new web sites are clones of the original sites as of 5:00 PM PDT, Friday, August 7th.

The main site can be found at: http://nmra2015.sbcrailway.ca
and the mobile friendly version at: http://mobile.sbcrailway.ca

The old sites now have redirection links to the new ones so that at least there will be something on the old sites to let people know where we went, if they are working.

I will not be surprised if you find some broken links or other issues with the new sites, and when you do, please let me know so that I can fix them quickly. The sites are very rich with links both within the site and to external places to make it easy for you to find things and to get to related information, but that complexity can hide a few surprises. Please send anything that you find to me at webmaster@sbcrailway.ca

Thank you very much for your continued patience during this very difficult time. Unfortunately there was nothing that could be done to help resolve the issue, other than to move, which is what I have now done.