Has "Safe at Home" Self-Quarantine Shut Down Your Club?

Every one I know of around here, both formal ones that elect officers and charge dues, and informal round robin groups.

Yes our club is shut down. Several members, including myself, are working on our own layouts. 

We will have a virtual work night and show what we are working on comment on products.

I have had donations of trains and people will drop items off in my spare garage.  I just let it sit there.

Houston Tinplate at Memorial City Mall is down.. So is the Mall....

Hi Mat, Dom and Don

The TMB club on Long Island is shut down. No member activity and all members required to remain home until further notice.

Luckily we had our last open house of the season March 7 and 8 and had 875 guests visit the layout just before all the Quarantine restrictions were mandated here in NY.  We don't know if we had any sick visitors so the following week a few members made the last trip to the club and disinfected the entire room and perimeter of the layout.  We also had one of our members test positive for the Corona Virus and thankfully he has recovered.

Hope all the other clubs membership is healthy

The National Capital Trackers (NCT) and my model flying club, Patuxent Aeromodelers, have virtual meetings but no shows/operating sessions.  The aeroclub's flying field is within a state park, which has remained open, so I guess I can still go fly as long as we maintain social distancing.  I could call it exercising my hands.  I believe my local Maryland chapter of the National Rocketry Association is also doing virtual but have not participated.  All other clubs, as far as I know, are doing nothing right now.

I am working on the modules I use with NCT to make them look better, especially the bridge one.

We had many weekends of work days that have just been put off until this mess is over......we are all working at home on small projects.

Peter

My club of one is open! However even our second member (our grandson) isn't attending? That hurts!

Yep....we're shut down.

Greg

For my operating club, the Paradise and Pacific it has been shut down since the end of March as it part of a city park.

My TCA division wisely made the decision to not meet until further notice as the demographic is a high risk one. 

I fully support both decisions.  Better safe than to see my friends suffer needlessly.

The Roanoke Valley Model Railroad Club is closed. When the Virginia Museum of Transportation closed we were told we had to close along with them (we meet in their basement).

Scott Smith

There must be an old folk song about this crap, you need to drink a few drops of old #7 to kill the big misery in your heart. NO TRAINS! O the humanities!  Now just stay at home and be happy your not pushing up daisies, a good time to sharpen up you making the wife crazy skills. 

Of course it did. Haven't met for the last two scheduled meetings. 

Dave

Yes; Bedford [Ohio] recreation center is closed thus closing the Western Reserve Model Railroad Club.

Also the Tuesday Night Train Crew has suspended our weekly round robin visits.

Lou N

We're closed, we've been using Zoom to have virtual club meetings.

John Pignatelli JR. posted:

There must be an old folk song about this crap, you need to drink a few drops of old #7 to kill the big misery in your heart. NO TRAINS! O the humanities!  Now just stay at home and be happy your not pushing up daisies, a good time to sharpen up you making the wife crazy skills. 

My skills are plenty sharp.

AGHRMatt posted:

We've been shut down for a couple of weeks. Did a security check on the building this morning and was wondering how many other club operations are stalled. I've heard several meets have been cancelled. Hopefully, things in Los Angeles will clear up in time for Open House next month.

There's more than a whiff of Garcetti about this. Plus, i suspect, fear of a lawsuit...tort lawyers gotta eat, too.

We could go to the club with face masks on, keep 6 ft away from others, etc. Knowing our guys, these activities would be self-reinforcing.

Yes, our club, RealRail, here in Bradenton-Sarasota is closed.  I believe that a member may occasionally stop there for a bit but not for long. No meetings.

Beings no clubs in my area we don't have to worry about closing any of them.

Dave

rex desilets posted:

We could go to the club with face masks on, keep 6 ft away from others, etc. Knowing our guys, these activities would be self-reinforcing.

You do understand that we don't really know in any precise manner the ways in which this terribly infectious highly virulent disease is transmitted? The effectiveness of homemade masks (the only thing available to nearly all of us) is at best the containment of coughs/sneezes by the wearer. These masks cannot stop aerosols and there is mounting evidence that viable SARS CoV2 particles can indeed be carried by aerosols. Think tobacco smoke: how far does it travel? Please, if you want to risk your life that is your prerogative as long as you don't also risk the lives of others. Your friends, for example.

First day back for us may be June 13th. Unless that date is extended.

The 

Milwaukee Lionel Railroad Club

has been closed for about 3 weeks.  The leadership will revisit the Covid-19 situation at the end of April.  The membership is in the one of the most vulnerable groups susceptible to the Corona virus. 

I just joined this year (it's a 75 mile drive for me).  Just a bunch of nice guys that have built a great club and I would hate to see anything bad happen to one of them. 

My club has been shut down for COVID-19.  Our layout is a travelling one and the return to the local mall where we had a bay, no go.  In addition to that we have breakfast meetings each Monday and Friday (as one of the few non-retirees in the club, I rarely get to attend ) which have been cancelled.

The HO+N club that I used to be a member of until recently (South Florida Railway Museum) has also shut down.

Yes, it has. Our monthly business meetings have moved to zoom rather than a local bbq restaurant.

We had 5 shows in 5 weeks during April and May lined up. All have been cancelled or postponed. 

Both my clubs are on hiatus. Market Deeping Model Railway Club is doing a Skype session, with mixed results. Northants and Rutland O Gauge Group meets every two months in a village hall, so that’s on stop. 

Both our local NRHS chapter and the Sugar Creek MRRC are closed for the duration.  In addition, the Arkansas and Missouri has suspended all excursion operations.  

Mitch 

Yes.  Our club has been meeting in an empty room where I work for several months, and our new, under-construction layout is there.  though I am still working in the office, only two other staff members are allowed in the building.

The San Diego 3-Railers and the San Diego Model Railroad Museum shut down on March 16 and have stayed close since. The museum staff is only getting paid right now and they need donations to stay afloat. 

The club’s presidents are the only non-employees who have access to the building. The city has closed the parking lots and other museums in the Balboa Park Area.

The Live steam club in another City has closed all it’s parks and we can’t access the park. Currently in my backyard we have a trailer with boxes of plastic ties sitting and waiting to get unloaded at the facility.

At another museum, I manage the 3-Rail layout. I have gone down to pick up stuff that is broken and fix it at home. Also have done other maintenance on that layout. 

Yes, NJ Hirailers, Paterson, NJ is in the "ground zero" NYC metro area thats' getting hammered with the virus. 

The San Leandro Historical Railway Society (SLHRS) has been closed since March 16.  One member has been going to the club alone to pull weeds on the G&O.  We have had several days of rain.  That means we get a lot of weeds.  Garden railroading is a bit like real railroading in that the track requires constant maintenance.  

The SLHRS won't open again until the SF Bay Area reopens.  The SF Bay Area is generally more proactive about this virus than the state of CA.  CA only shut down after the Bay Area had already been shut down for several days.  

The silver lining with this shut down, if there is one, is that many of the club members including me are getting much more work done on our home layouts.   I am thankful to be involved in a hobby that I enjoy alone and in a group.  NH Joe

Yup.  the NJ Hi-Railers  are shut down until further notice.   I'd be interested if anyone HAS stayed open.  I hope not.  

The Chris Lord basement club is open and under construction.  The only problem is at this time it has only one member!

Yes, we are shut down until May. I do miss our Tuesday meetings. The Children Museum where our club is located is closed too.

Based on what I have seen here in the NY/NJ area, which is several weeks  ahead of many places, it is going to be a while before clubs are going to be able to meet or any other kind of gatherings are going to be allowed. I can tell you that with big organizations that spend a lot of money and time on contingency planning, including the one I work for, they are spending a lot of time trying to figure out when and how best to 'ramp up' again (and with my company, we are fortunate that our core business allowed pretty much an entire 5000 employee company to work from home, many businesses aren't so lucky or fortunate, yet the BCP (business continuity planners) are sweating this one with upper level execs).

The research reports they are using are some of the latest, and they seem to indicate from what I have seen and be told that restarting in many places won't be able to start to happen until late May, and that is optimistic, and that is just a start. It means likely that gatherings and the like won't be allowed until they are certain that the virus is under some kind of containment or is manageable, and right now it isn't close,not by a long shot.  It obviously depends where you live, but a lot of areas are just now starting to get hit with this, it was slow to spread initially but now is spreading, so even folks in more rural/less congested are going to be affected by this..and honestly the emphasis is going to be on getting businesses back up and running and literally getting the economy going, clubs and personal gatherings, while important to us, simply are not going to be a priority. 

One thing I can tell you is that the people enforcing these restrictions have not shut down the economy of their area to throw around their power, as I have heard some say, they aren't doing it to keep people from having fun, they are doing this to try and keep a lot of people from getting this nasty virus and if not dying, being in many cases left with big problems (and  needless to say, being not particularly young myself, clubs and such tend to be full of a lot members more at risk).  Want to know the only no risk way to hold club meetings? If you know that every member who goes to meetings is immune, which given how few people we can know since antibody tests are not readily available and testing for the virus only counts if someone tested positive and is past the infectious period, is next to impossible. And to be honest, people don't help, they had what I considered reasonable standards for parks and beaches here in NJ, places where we could walk the mutts, fish, just get some exercise, and a lot of people ignored the rules, had large gatherings, and ended up with those being shut down, there just is little room for people being stupid at this point. 

The good news is the club will be there and eventually we will come out of this.  It is not easy, not dismissing it, I can of have a Twilight Zone moment myself that I am in a position to finally build my layout, I got the table built, designed the layout, after literally 20 year of work towards it was ready..and this hit, and I can't at the moment justify spending the significant resources it will take, not with uncertainty and with trying to help others, so I understand. My son's chamber group had a summer that very well could have been a breakout one for them, that has been blown to kingdom come..but in light of the real human suffering out there (they are creating mass graves at the NYC potter's field, near where I used to keep a sailboat), I can only count my blessings. I hope this doesn't violate the rules of the forum, it is about the impact of this miserable, nasty virus on our hobby and trying to put it in perspective, only bad guy here is a teeny tiny bundle of messenger RNA......

Our club, Ocean County Society of Model Railroaders, has been shut down since March 19 until further notice from the township. Since we share the building with the Lakewood Historical Museum and are located in a township building that was left abandoned for almost 30 years, the museum has a 75 year lease from the township and our club is on that lease as well. We have to abide by the what the township dictates and I am not complaining. The mayor is into O gauge trains like the rest of us.

I might entertain a Zoom meeting in the near future. For now, the museum folks and myself with 2 others are the only ones permitted to check on the building weekly.

Ted Bertiger posted:

I might entertain a Zoom meeting in the near future. For now, the museum folks and myself with 2 others are the only ones permitted to check on the building weekly.

The Arkansas and Missouri has been running a weekly conductors' meeting using Zoom, and it seems to be working fairly well... 

Mitch 

We have indefinitely  suspended our weekly Club meetings  and all the local train shows were cancelled.

The Nuese River Model Railroad Club of Raleigh N C is in lockdown.

Seems like single member clubs are the only ones open and that is just to the person that owns the layout. Everything is shut down in South Carolina and looks like it will be that way for the foreseeable future.

Surprised this has not be deleted since any post referring to the current situation has. There are several similar that are still here.

The terms with the current situation is that it is okay to talk about it on here as long as it relates to the hobby, and this thread is relevant to that, along with discussions about if people are using the time at home to work on their layouts, balancing spending on the layout vs other needs, etc.