Clinic On June 15, 2026
The Franklin Southern Backstory: What? Why? When? Where? How?
Mark Shifter Biography
Mark Shifter is a person with Midwestern roots and Front Range experience. Born in the St. Louis area, raised in Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska, Mark received a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the mid-80’s. He spent 13 years in the Kansas City area before relocating to Colorado 25 years ago. Mark has been a licensed architect since 1991 and has his own practice designing residential and commercial projects. While architecture is a passion and his livelihood; he is also a musician and songwriter and dabbles as an artist as well.
Let Mark lead you through the development of his Franklin Southern Layout. This layout has many Carolina scenes and hosts a number of operating sessions.
Clinic On May 18, 2026
Layout Design by Armstrong Squares
Rodney Black Biography
Rodney grew up in Iowa, just north of Burlington. The shared Rock Island and CB&Q track ran through his back yard. After succumbing to the fumes (gas and perfume), Rodney went to college, graduate school, marriage, and started a career in software engineering, first at Burroughs Corp, then Bell Labs, working on telecommunications systems. His toddler son revived his interest in trains.
He got hooked on the operations bug on Doug Geiger’s Granite Mountain Ry. Now, the children are grown and left home, but didn’t take the bug with them. He retired for a few months in 2013, but was lured into working at Intermountain Railway, temporarily, part-time. Five years later, Rodney retired permanently, but is still practicing his trade by developing signaling software for model railroads. You will not likely see any of his models or photos entered in a contest, so he gives back by making his software (Computer Automated Traffic System, or CATS) freely available to the model railroad community. His interests are in signaling, modern (or recent) equipment and he dabbles in N scale.
In this clinic, Rodney is planning on discussing techniques for track planning. Central among these is something the legendary John Armstrong proposed decades ago involving
squares. Squares are not the end all as they can’t be used for putting in the details, but they are quite useful for estimating what will fit in a given space. Thus, they can be used with any drawing assist – CAD, pencil, and even just try it.
Clinic On Hold – Waiting on Date
History of the Denver Tramway Streetcar .04
Wally Weart will present the above-mentioned Clinic. This was the last streetcar to operate in revenue in Denver, and it had several narrow escapes during its life. One of its escapes was the conversion from standard gauge to a narrow-gauge electric streetcar. Wally will add some history of the Denver Tramway network along with some additional pictures he has accumulated. Wally is a long-time member of the Front Range Division and the NMRA.
