The Return To The Caboose! Chester On Track Festival 2022 & The W1R Special Event Station

Life is such a meandering journey. Back in January 2021, when AA1F was still WX1MAR, and this blog was in its infancy, we rented the Caboose at the Chester Railway Station & Museum for Winter Field Day. It was an extremely cold stay with single digit temperatures. The post is here and the throwback photo is below.

Then when Dave Pierce, the proprietor of the Station sent me a note earlier this year asking if we wanted to have a ham radio demo at the annual Chester On Track Festival, celebrating Chester’s railway heritage, we could not resist! That is Dave below in front of the station. He did not pause for a second during the event, he was working so hard! This is the only picture of him we managed to snag! And if you look alongside the flag pole, you will see the configuration of our antennas (yes, two antennas, more on this later).

Of course, the irony was that it was going to be an unseasonably hot 90F+ degree day. Who knew Chester Massachusetts was the home of such extreme weather in the setting of radio operations?? By the time we were set up and ready to get on the air, the festivities were well underway. Standing on the platform of the station and peering across the train tracks, Main Street is bustling! The parade had already gone by.

The Chester Station was packed with railroad memorabilia and vendors inside and out. That is looking down the Station platform below.

And inside the Station which doubles as a railway museum.

There was a fine selection of model train set pieces for sale. I cannot even pretend I know anything about these, other than they are impressive.

These visitors are enjoying a delicious lunch from The Blue Caboose!

A view from the collection of box cars from one of the purposely unused parking areas…

And then looking down to a field with more tents, vendors, and festivities. Chester On Track was a real party!!

We ate lunch from the Blue Caboose too! That is a piece of Reflectix covering my radio station. I went with the Icom IC-705, with an LDG Z-100 autotuner, the RM Italy MLA100 100W amplifier, Bioenno 15AH battery, and 20M band pass filter for the event. It was 90 degrees with direct sun beaming onto the equipment. A section of Reflectix, normally used for blocking out the windows in my van while camping, does a great job of keeping things cool…

AA1F of course had his Yaesu FT-891 and was operating on 40M. Don’t be fooled, he switched over to my 20M station while I grabbed us lunch…

The antenna set-up in such tight and heavily trafficked quarters, surrounded by power lines was tricky. I highlighted the radiator wires in pink below. Notice how the entire set-up goes over the main entrance walkway. Anyone who knows anything about my radio interests, knows that setting up antennas in interesting configurations is my forte!

So what exactly is that antenna set-up? If you look alongside the flag pole, you can see a blue bucket with a PVC pipe sticking out from it. This is a bucket filled with concrete. The Mr. LongArm 3-section telescopic painter pole (23 feet in total height) is fitted with a T-section of PVC piping at the top. To this, and using 550 paracord, the free ends of two separate wire radiators are attached. The commercial 20M endfed half-wave antenna goes off toward the right and the DIY 40M endfed half-wave antenna goes off to the left.

The transformers (ununs) of each antenna are essentially on the ground. In fact, I needed to use the rocks of the retaining wall as an anchor for one of the antennas, as I did not think to bring stakes. It is often a mystery to me as to how I am going to set up the antennas at these events. And its one of my great joys to figure it out! (Sorry about the blurred picture, I got sunscreen lotion on the lens!)

The painter pole was lashed to the flag pole. The weighted bucket makes a heavy anchor, but is prone to tip over if its on its not guyed down. The other bucket in the background is where the unun for the 20M EFHW antenna is tied to.

Now this is a beautiful site of small town Americana!

Downtown Chester is located in a valley, so propagation can be a challenge. This picture tries to show the steep canyon walls that surround the Station, but doesn’t do it justice. Cars were packing in everywhere for the Festival.

I even had a practical reason to try out my handmade “Ask About Ham Radio” antenna banner… to deter people from walking in to our wires! I plan on making more of these; perhaps a future blog post!

And the local characters were starting to show up in droves! This lady had an amazing costume, dressed as the “Wild & Scenic” Westfield River, and she was happy to show it off…

She paddled right by us…

Well, lookee! I was there too!

An up-and-coming regional band, The 413s, composed of high schoolers and college students took the stage next to us. I would link to their website, but kids this age do not blog! Nor do I instagram… They were one of three acts to play on the platform (unfortunately I did not catch the name of the other ones). These kids rocked! My only regret of the day was that I did not buy one of their t-shirts…

You can see how close to the band we are in this picture…

And their rock-and-rolling was quite loud (as would be expected from a 70s and 80s hair band style gig). So we stopped transmitting for a while and enjoyed the show…

I took a walk to the caboose for old times’ sake…

Once inside the train car, I noticed something Dave had told me about right away…

A reporter had actually written a story on our Winter Field Day event…

And Dave framed it and hung it on the wall! How more connected to this caboose can I feel? I wanted to say to those kids running around inside…”Hey, that story is about me!” But I just smiled and took a few pictures… Oh, and if you want to know a bit about becoming “The Bearsden Radio Gang”, well, its a bit of a secret…

Chester On Track thought of everything! There was even a misting station set up in the street to keep everyone cool!

A couple of more views of the front of the Chester Station where we spent most of our time for the event.

After being in the sun and 90 degree heat since 8:30 am, we packed up around 2pm. One of our batteries was drained, and the last band was starting to key up.

Ultimately we made a couple dozen contacts in a mixture of ways. A handful from spotting the W1R special event station call. Some more from chasing parks and other special event stations. And quite a few from the Arkansas QSO party. We had surprisingly good propagation when we were able to transmit in between musical acts. The IC-705 was impacted quite a bit by AA1F’s transmission despite the band pass filters. On the other hand, the Yaesu FT-891 didn’t notice me transmitting at all. Even so, we spent quite a chunk of time off of the air and enjoying the bands. The Chester On Track Festival 2022 in its entirety was a resounding success that I would recommend to anyone! And for us, we got a chance to be a part of something. And we were able to put our beloved hobby of ham radio on display! A fabulous experience. Thank you so much yet again Dave for sharing your amazing and magical Railway Station with us!

Only the Best,

KM1NDY