Canada Director
John graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba in 1978, and retired after 40 years as a professor in 2019. (His sense of timing is excellent.) He has a lot of administrative experience, having been the Secretary of NMRA Canada and the Treasurer of the Winnipeg Model Railroad Club. He was the Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manitoba, and the Secretary of the Canadian Association for Computer Science.
He has been interested in trains since at least the age of 4, after watching the action in the CPR yard in Cranbrook, BC. He's fairly sure that he had to be forcibly removed under loud protest. He became aware of serious scale model railroading when the NMRA National Convention was held in Winnipeg in 1983, and began with an N scale train set shortly after. His current model railroad is a freelanced short line, in N scale, set in the mountains of southern British Columbia. He has given clinics on technology, computers, and programming related to model railroading at the local, Regional, and National levels. One of his clinics can be found on the NMRA website.
He believes that the NMRA must be careful to keep abreast of new trends and technologies in order to remain relevant to new generations of model railroaders.