Thank you for coming to Portland, Oregon and Portland Daylight Express, the National Model Railroad Association Annual Convention for 2015.
Fifteen hundred of you visited from 47 States, including 305 from California, a large contingent of 153 from Canada, several each from Australia 39, United Kingdom 31, New Zealand 18, and from France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, Argentina.
We hope you had a great time.
Some of us have been engaged in this project for more than four years. Others came aboard as elements developed. Finally volunteers joined in to assist delivery during the convention week.
This has been an incredible journey, ably led by our chairman Doug Auburg.
A small team did the planning and development, including: Steven Watkins on layout tours and local registration, Paul Nasiatka our Treasurer, Greg Madsen as webmaster, Suzy Madsen on Non-Rail and General Tours, Charlie Comstock on Clinics, Paul Hobbs on timetable and publicity, then auction, Jack Hamilton solicited volunteers.
During the event Gene Nedrow handled inside activities, Keith and Ursula Ansell worked the Company Store and Isaac Harpole dispatched the tours. As ever, Bob Hamm and his team came and did the Contests, Clark Kooning and his experts did the Modeling with the Masters program. We thank Jenny Hendricks and her team at HQ for their handling of many tasks.
Notice that a number of these folks do not live local to the convention, several not living in the US at all. You do not need to live nearby to provide useful service to the event; you might consider helping future events. We thank Jenny Hendricks and her team at HQ for their handling of many tasks.
We were able to visit with old and new friends, see tremendous layouts, clinics, contest entries, prototype, SIG and general interest activities, and participate in the auction. There should have been some special, memorable, moments for you.
Ladies in the non-rail program made 34 quilts to be presented to Project Linus, which were gratefully accepted. Kristy Webster embroidered names on convention shirts for those wanting them and gave a hilarious luncheon presentation.
The auction had 87 sellers, 315 buyers for the 926 items sold of 1173 entered. We sold 79% of the entered items, much better than the average 66%. It was a small auction, but of good quality, as the dollars were similar to last year, which had over 2000 items.
A bus broke down, a train hit a car, a couple of trips did not get their lunches, and some antique stores did not open on Mondays. Such incidents are not unusual for events of this complexity. Sorry about them!
We will be keeping the web site at nmra2015.sbcrailway.ca available for some time to come, and we will be posting presentations and handouts from the clinics there as we receive them.
Have a safe trip home.
We look forward to visiting the efforts of Steve Studley and his team at Indianapolis next July.
Best Wishes
PDX 2015 planning committee – retired!
