From the pages of Canadian Railway Modeller: Morgan Turney, in his own words

Today, DCC is the standard way people operate trains. In this Dome Car, we are taken back to when DCC was just entering the model railroad marketplace. (The NMRA had just standardized DCC two years earlier in 1993.) You can hear the fascination in Morgan's words as he uses it for the first time. As he put it: “It was like I was in total control of running the operations of the locomotives, just as one would be on the prototype.” All he needed was horn and bell sounds, and it would be perfect, he said—something that is, of course, standard these days. How do you think the advancements in digital command control (DCC) will affect future model railroaders and their layouts? I had a sneak preview of what to expect last week, when on my weekly visit to the local hobby shops in town, I had the opportunity to 'play with' the system introduced by Wangrow Electronics called the System One. The Wangrow company is one of four better-know companies producing DCC systems, the others...

  This Dome Car highlights one of Morgan’s interests—prairie skyscrapers, aka wood grain elevators. He made a commitment to photograph as many as he could before they were torn down. Sometimes he took pictures when they were being destroyed.   We are all feeling the pinch these days economically, what with tariffs and all, but the early 1990s were also a time when people were struggling with finances—as Morgan points out when he talks about the rising price for paper affecting everything from magazines to cereal to coffee.   And also just like now, he writes about the need to attract more young people to the hobby. In that respect, the 1995 Toronto train show was very encouraging!   It looks like Canadian railway geography is about to make a big change. I've just finished watching CBC's Venture, where the program discussed the effects on the grain industry once the Crow Rate is gone. I won't go into what the Crow Rate is, but once it disappears, grain farme...

  Five years! With this issue, Morgan marked the 5 th anniversary of CRM. Since it started, he said the magazine had published about 200 articles and countless photos, along with book reviews and other things. He was proud to have published the work of Canadian modellers and, best of all, to see an increase in the number of Canadian model railroad items—something easy to take for granted today. (As proof, Athearn announced it is bringing out a “what if” BC Rail SD90MAC-H PH I unit in BC Rail green lightning stripe livery. That would have been impossible 30 years ago.) Considering the challenges he faced getting this far, the anniversary was worth celebrating.     I remember it like it was yesterday. A day much like today; overcast and snowy, fairly crispy and cold. The 'Canadian' still ran on Canadian Pacific Railway trackage. Talk of the cabooseless train was on everybody's mind and Canadian National and BC Rail were about to step into 'the nineties' with the ...

In this Dome Car, Morgan takes us to Russia to learn about model railroading through the eyes of a Canadian modeller. That was just five years after the Berlin Wall fell, a time when we thought maybe we were on the verge of a new and peaceful and less polarized world. And he notes that the next issue will mark the beginning of the fifth year of CRM—a real milestone for him and for the magazine.   When it comes to modelling, railfanning and locomotive preservation, sometimes we don't realize how lucky we are here in North America, especially after reading a letter from a railfan who has recently returned from a visit to Russia.   Jim Little, a CP modeller in the southern Ontario area who has written articles for us in the past, dropped me a note about his experiences during a trip he made this past summer with his wife to the former Soviet Union. Jim reports that while on a visit to a museum of Russian steam locomotives in St. Petersburg, that sadly all the equipment sits o...