Lots of little trains

[dmaze]

As promised, I made my way out to the Amherst Rail Society's Big 2005 Railroad Hobby Show in Springfield. It was...big, taking up three buildings at the Big E. There were many, many booths of people selling model railroad paraphernalia. I decided I didn't need any of it (right now my shopping list is just small things, my wish list is the MEC GP40, and I want to build my own DCC system) and so saved myself potentially vast sums of money.

But the big highlight of the show was the layouts. It looks like there were 14 layouts, in N, HO, O, and G scales. They were all very modular (which actually kind of makes sense if you're dragging things to shows). astra_nomer: there were a few booths that sold S-gauge things, I picked up a flyer from Port Lines Hobby Supply.

(All my pictures)

	Several of the layouts did interesting things with water. There were dams, rivers, bridges, even a ship or two out there.
	Other layouts were more whimsical. The huge N-Trak layout (back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the main loop is about 6 scale miles long) included both a circus and a zoo, along with a cemetery at one of the road intersections. A corner N-Trak module was a drive-in movie theater, with an actual movie playing on the screen.

The layouts also included the requisite supply of towns, yards, mines, etc. The big HO layout had a pretty impressive station (complete with yellow "D.I.B." signs!). There were varying levels of detail; some of them were pretty nice, and others (particularly the G layout) were just "tracks on substrate".

There were very few signals out there, to my disappointment, and what there was was mostly single-head color-light two-block automatic signals (even if they were on a larger tower). One of the HO layouts had a demo loop that had two upper-quadrant semaphore signals, which were kind of neat. These people had what looked like reasonable N-scale signals for sale for half the price of the New Brunswick guy, but there are three different single-color LEDs in each head; it's tempting to try to come up with one and try to replace the LEDs.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I was flattered to be mentioned in your journal. I'm the New Brunswick guy. I am a reseller for SMD Products signals and we are quite proud of the sellection we are able to provide. Over 12 different signals for N scale.

I would like to point out that the price is (in this case) proportional to quality. I am proud to say that any of our N scale signal are superior in detail quality and workmanship.

Our 30 day money back policy ensures that you will be satisfied.

We do take some custom orders. Obviously those cannot be supported by our return policy.

I also offer various products such as traffic signs http://www.traffic-signs.scale-train.com/ and real graffiti decals http://www.graffiti.scale-train.com/

Best regards,
Alain Pelletier
http://www.n-scale-model-railroad.alain-pelletier.com/

[unclenomer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Port Line tip. I actually discovered them on-line a week or two ago as they are the only place I've found that advertises repairing a bum AF air chime controller. The little guy is anxious for his locomotive to have both smoke and a whistle. :-) And now that he's finished building his tunnel he needs to build his
station and railing. That's all I heard about this weekend.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Ditto. The little engineer is no longer just satisfied watching the train go around its loop -- gotta work on that layout now!