Photos from the 2011 St. Louis RPM Meet, which was held on August 5th and 6th, 2011 at the Gateway Convention Center in Collinsville, IL. The meet was hosted by Lonnie Bathurst,Dan Kohlberg and John Golden. 270 attendees brought over 920 models of all scales, eras and prototypes for display and discussion.

More thorough coverage of the models at the meet can be found on Perry' Lambert's excellent PBase site at https://pbase.com/superfleet93/st_louis_rpm_2011.

We are grateful to our clinicians, including Chuck Hitchcock, Ed Hawkins, Keith Jordan, Rob Adams, Nick Molo, Mont Switzer, Clark Propst, Tony Sissons, Matthew Herman, and Dan & John Kohlberg, for bringing new ideas and encouragement to the hobby, and for helping our event to be a big success.

Thank you to our vendors and historical societies for your service. 65 tables of hand-selected vendors provided models, parts, photos, books, memorabilia and other merchandise to our guests. They also contributed a wide variety of gifts for the door prize raffle as well.

On behalf of our vendors and manufacturers, we were happy to present $5,000 in door prizes, including locomotives, sound systems, freight cars, and a wide variety of detail parts, gifter certificates, and other items. And believe it or not, every one of 170 attendees that stayed for the late Saturday giveaway won at least one door prize! We’d especially like to thank Matt Herman of LokSound, who graciously provided brand-new LokSound locomotive decoders to a handful of guys that didn’t win a door prize during the drawing. He made sure that no one went home empty-handed. Thanks Matt! Also, as part of their entrance fee, everyone was given a copy of Railroad Prototype Cyclopedia #1 at the door, thanks to Ed Hawkins and the RP Cyc. Publishing Co. Thanks Ed! Dan, Lonnie and I were humbled by the generosity of manufacturers and our vendors.

The next edition of St. Louis RPM is tentatively scheduled for mid-July, 2012. We hope to see you there! - John Golden