While cleaning out the garage, I came across an old membership application for the SVL from 1988, when the club was still new, modular, and operating in a pair of trailers in the Milpitas area. This was just after the six founding members had put up $600 each to buy the trailers from GE.

It’s interesting to see that in a standard Ops session, we’d run 10 trains, most of which were passenger. 30 years later, we run about 20+ trains in a given operating session, but almost exclusively freight (Hey, that’s pretty prototypical, no?). We still use DTC for our Ops sessions, but command control and touchpanels have definitely made our lives simpler for those of us operating the layout.

Regardless, it’s an interesting find from 30 years ago in the club’s history. Who knows what the next 30 years holds. Only time will tell!