"After Action Report" Days of Yore 2024

 

This update is an "After Action Report" on an historic event in the history of the Alberta MTC Line.

Days of Yore was very successful with over a 2200 people attending.

I setup a display connected to the Alberta MTC Line at the Didsbury Museum on Wednesday evening and it worked very well. Here is a photo of the display courtesy of the Museum FB page.

Alberta MTC Line station at
Didsbury Museum

We spent a very hot Friday afternoon and evening getting everything setup in our Victorian Society of Alberta (VSA) encampment, officially the second largest but it looked to me like the largest (not bragging or anything). Unusually for this event there was no rain or thunderstorms during the setup which was very nice indeed. Once the main camp was mostly setup I started working on the telegraph display. Setting up the main display then stringing the wire that runs from the WWI 10th Battalion camp to the display in the VSA camp and across to the Yankee Valley Yankees Civil War camp. Total distance between the endpoints being around 150'

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Once the line was in place and the ground stakes put in at the WWI and Yankees camps, I connected the batteries and powered up the display. The landline portion of the telegraph worked flawlessly! (Yay) However, the computer link to the MTC line did not. (Boo).

After a bunch of trouble shooting (and some not very genteel language) using my laptops and phone, it became apparent that something was wrong with the WiFi connection through the Quadra that makes the link from my display to the line. It would have been a easy fix with a monitor and keyboard handy but alas the 19th century did not have such things.

Main VSA Station

I tried connecting my little netbook to the display to use that as the link but was unable to get that connection to work. So cutting my losses I decided to setup the laptop as a standalone link to the MTC line and called it a night. This meant that there would be no traffic onto the MTC line from the three stations at the event, however there would still be three active stations generating traffic on the Saturday and visitors to my station at DOY would be able to hear that traffic in parallel to my demonstrations at the VSA display. Visitors to the Didsbury Museum would also hear the traffic from their display.

Saturday dawned chilly but sunny and quickly got very warm.

Gates opened promptly at 11:00 AM and very soon people found my display. I was busy describing the setup, how the code worked, the history of the code, and why International Morse Code is different from American Morse code.
Cardston and the two stations in Heritage Park kept up a steady stream of telegraph traffic for most of the day. My little laptop did a sterling job playing that out in the background.

Alberta MTC Line display

The Alberta MTC line display was on a table beside my main display. The little netbook was hidden behind the upturned box on which I taped a copy of the MTC Line map. The large QR code allowed visitors to see the traffic in real time once they scanned the link on their phones.

Describing the Alberta MTC Line project attracted a lot of attention. The melding of our old technology with the new seemed to strike an interest with the public young and old. I made one formal presentation to the crowd on Saturday and that seemed well received. I was interviewed by the local radio station and they were very interested in the MTC line as well. Later in the afternoon the sky began to get that threatening look common on the prairies during a hot Summer day.

At one point I looked across to the WWI station and noticed a young fellow in his WWI uniform being instructed by his Sergent to work on the line. The Sergent came over and asked me to tell the the soldier how to work the key and give him some hints on using the code. So I went over and did just that. The young man seemed very keen.

Suddenly the line went dead!  I looked back to the VSA camp to see my fellow Victorians rapidly taking the sunshade over my display down! The radar was looking very nasty indeed so I quickly laid the line and poles down and disconnected everything from the ground stakes and we "battened down the hatches".
The wind and rain was terrific but luckily there was no hail or any significant lightning.  It did cool the day off quite nicely though.

Sunday started a bit cloudy which kept the temperatures more reasonable.

After breakfast I was able to get everything set back up and in the process managed to get the link between my display and my netbook to work so the three stations at the event were finally live on the MTC line!

Senior NCO of the 10th Battalion
manning the WWI station.

Col Bishop beside the
Civil War USMT station

Looking at our website I could see that six of the stations were connected. The two stations at Heritage Park were not manned on Sunday and the operator, in Cardston was busy doing "modern stuff", so the only traffic was coming from the three stations at DOY. 

However, the young re-enactor in the 10th Battalion was still keen, working steadily and practicing on the key. He was even able to send understandable words by the end of the day! The advantage of younger brains that.

Janice Povey and Marilyn Maguire
Calgary Chapter MTC

Two members of the Calgary chapter of the MTC joined me and we kept lots of traffic flowing on the line. I made two more formal presentations and interest in both the telegraph and the Alberta MTC line was still high amongst the the visitors who came to my display.

 I heard from the director of the Didsbury Museum when she came by that the display there was very well received and the steady traffic on Saturday definitely attracted attention from their visitors.

After a long but interesting day we took everything apart once the gates closed at 5:30 and started the massive Tetris game that is packing up a small village's worth of gear. There was no afternoon thunderstorm which helped that process along as well.

Days of Yore 2024 is now behind us and the Alberta MTC Line figured prominently with seven stations connected, four stations on Saturday and six on Sunday click clacking from Cardston to Didsbury! That is a distance of 281 km or 175 miles as the birds fly.

73 (Telegrapher's code for 'Best Wishes')
Ciao
Kevin Jepson (KJ)
Instigator and Wire Chief
Alberta MTC Line Project

 

Alberta MTC Line DOY 2024