Yup, another one of those "playing with trains" quotes. Great job, Mr. NMRA.

Howard P.

From the referenced article:

"Convention-goers will also travel the region — from Boston to Albany and in between — visiting model train layouts in people's homes."

When you go to the OPSIG (Operations Special Interest Group) page of the NMRA Hartford Convention website it shows a pretty large proportion of the layout operating sessions now have "cancelled" lines drawn through them. See the bottom of this page:

http://www.opsig.org/convention/

It makes you wonder why they scheduled so many events just to end up pulling the plug on them. I also heard some of their fantrips were cancelled. This gives the impression that the turnout is less than was anticipated. Anybody heard any reliable feedback on the attendance at this convention?

PC

Answering my previous question, a friend who was involved with some of the tours at the NMRA convention contacted me and advised that they did get enough attendance to reach their calculated "break even" number. They had to shed some activities to do that, and thus some of the cancellations.

PC

As a point of clarification, whether specific OpSIG sessions were held or not is not necessarily a good indicator of the Convention as a whole. The OpSIG operating sessions are not a component of the Convention budget. They are entirely a project of the OpSIG (an organization separate from the Convention Committee), and represent no cost to the Convention itself, particularly as all transportation to and from the sessions was provided by the participants. The NMRA Hartford National Convention Committee had no control over which OpSIG operating sessions were scheduled or which ones were cancelled.

OpSIG operating sessions were scheduled based on layout hosts being willing to offer them. The ones that were cancelled were due either to low sign-up (there are a lot of activities competing for an attendee's time) or due to hosts experiencing unanticipated events in their lives.

Now the museum visits, those were under the control of the Hartford National Convention Committee. It is common practice to schedule as many tours as you think that you can sell, then cancel the ones that have low uptake (it's easier to cancel a tour than to add one). If the bus contract for the entire Convention is negotiated the right way, it is not a financial blow to cancel a tour.