There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Wernher von Braun, and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes "gronked"--in club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use. Many of the parts for The System had been donated by the Western Electric College Gift Plan, directly from the phone company. The club's faculty advisor was also in charge of the campus phone system, and had seen to it that sophisticated phone equipment was available for the model railroaders. Using that equipment as a starting point, the Railroaders had devised a scheme which enabled several people to control trains at once, even if the trains were at different parts of the same track. Using dials appropriated from telephones, the TMRC "engineers" could specify which block of track they wanted control of, and run a train from there. This was done by using several types of phone company relays, including crossbar executors and step switches which let you actually hear the power being transferred from one block to another by an other-worldly chunka-chunka-chunka sound.