Monday, April 11, 2011

Vale NMRAnet

As of today, April 11, 2011 (and no this is not a late April fools piece) the two currently active NMRAnet discussion group on Yahoo Groups have disappeared! No notice to any of the members. Not even a word to the moderators. One of the moderators went to check why there was no email coming from the list, and guess what he found.

It's actually just a continuation of what has been a pretty torrid history for groups talking about NMRA. Back in mid-2005 David Harris established a group called MRR-LCB - to discuss layout control bus ideas! That group remained active, albeit sometimes sporadically, until mid-2010. Some discussion was entered into on the old NMRA DCC working group, but after the Detroit convention in 2007 a group known as NMRANET-WG-TECH was formed and operated from September 2007 until June 2010 - just before the NMRA convention in Milwaukee in July. Out of a discussion at Milwaukee with two gentlemen who agreed to try and moderate the discussion a new list, NMRANET was established about July 28th 2010 and continued in use until April 6th 2011.

NMRANET-WG-TECH was still alive on Yahoo today as was NMRANET but another group which had a transient life for a few weeks back in the first half of 2010, NMRANET-Applications, and NMRANETWG have now disappeared altogether.

Seems that our friend, one of the VossBros, has been trying to destroy the evidence out there! Or maybe he has decided that only the brothers can agree on what THEY actually want, and so they will handle it all themselves now? Who knows?

Not us! We are just the working group members, interested model railroaders and the interested manufacturers, we obviously don't matter.

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