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

[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!