After a lifetime (44 years) in New York City, I recently moved to rural Missouri just south of St. Louis, and for the "next" op season I'm working on getting a driver's license, my first car (only the insane drive in NYC), and trying to make friends and connections in the region so that I can get myself invited to an operating session.

It's a practical goal even if it's a bit of an unconventional response.

I suggest you lookup the Gateway Division of the NMRA located in St. Louis. They would be a good group to get involved with. They have a strong membership, a large number of operation focused layouts and a good group of guys.   John

I live in the Pacific NW, where the non-rainy season usually lasts from July to September, not leaving much time to be outdoors.

While people rarely spend much time working on their layout this time of year (so they can hit the steam railroads in the area or normal 1:1 scale BNSF/UP/Amtrak ops), Operating "Season" here really never ends. Just had an op session two weeks ago on my own layout and a large On30 layout near my home is having one in 2 weeks.

So the work on a layout slows down this time of year, but no so much op sessions.

In the Winter time here, we're prone to wind events, so about 4 months out of the year, it's a crapshoot on knowing for sure if your power will be on for an op session. This time of year, it's usually no big concern (although we had a highly unusual summer wind storm roll through here the weekend of the NMRA convention last year, which didn't affect the venues for the convention but cur power to thousand of people just north of Portland).

You can never have too much detail or too many trees on a layout.