I became a member of  FREMO  and visited one of their meets way back in April of 2011. I was asked the question on at least 3 or 4 occasions whether there was a FREMO group in India and I scoffed at the suggestion and dismissed the idea as one would, the most improbable or insane ….I could not have dreamt in my wildest dreams that 2 years hence i would actually participate in one, here in India. While not technically under the aegis of the FREMO group, the idea of having a modular railroad club emanated from FREMO and hence i take the liberty of calling it the FREMO group of Indian Railways or sometimes,the IRMRC – The Indian Railways modular railroad club.

As you may be aware i have been documenting the building of the modular staging yard in this blog and that formed part of the setup today……along with the modules which were brought by Rajit and the Daga brothers ….. together forming a layout which was 40 ft long and barely fitted into my layout room ….

Hookup was fast and easy and only a few steps were needed , like setting the various command stations to slave mode,  hooking up the loconet cables and setting the polarity of the track of individual modules to the same common. Some time was devoted to route programming and a few niggles like a busted UR92 radio receiver, loco addresses and momentum, coupler changing etc etc were fixed. We then operated even though we had no plan or timetable to follow and just generally mocked up situations and scenarios……… but boy was it fun for me cause i just love railroad operations …… here we see Rajit’s Garrett and a kit-bashed and repainted WDM2 ( an Indian railways diesel ) wannabe hauling some Deutsche Bahn freight cars !!!!

i am sure Rajit and the Daga brothers had as much fun as i did … here we see the Daga brothers ” Haripur” module and also Rajit’s module …. i do not know what he has called it ….

Unfortunately Ranjeev Dubeys module was not ready and if it is ready when we meet next ….. probably after about 3 months …. then we will need more space as these set of modules just about fit into the space we had ….. till then i assume we will work on the scenery aspect as well as the scratch-building of rolling stock ….. a small modest start but it all went of well with not too many glitches as one can expect in a “first time ever” meet ……

hopefully in the coming time we will have more people pitching in with modules and we can have even bigger setups…..