At last, the season of inactivity for us is over – time for another show at White’s Nursery and Garden Center. Our train club did two shows over the winter but we elected not to participate. We enjoy doing the shows at White’s as they are a little more “free-form” and we can do our own thing without having to fit into the overall scheme of a large club layout.
In a first for us we’ve decided to start doing our layouts on a table rather than on the floor. The first couple years we did a layout we were in a separate greenhouse and really had an unlimited area to set up in. However, just as in Nature, a train layout abhors a vacuum and the more space you have available the more “stuff” you need to fill it up. Eventually the management at the nursery decided to use the spot we were in for something else and we moved into the main area where the rest of the layouts were, though still on the floor. It was nice as we were setting up in a gravel area which meant we didn’t have to worry about an underlayment and it was still larger than one of the tables.
We used a 5′ X 10′ loop of track and borrowed the green carpet from other club members so we didn’t quite fill out the 6′ X 17″ space available. The next White’s show will be a winter theme and we have plenty of white sheets to use as underlayment for that and by the time the next spring show rolls around we’ll have our own green mat. Our knees and backs appreciated not having to do all the up and down a layout on the floor entailed and we’ll be setting up on one of the tables from now on.
In our continuing adventures with micro-layouts we debuted the Dismal Creek Recreational Area. We’re using a 33 inch circle of track that’s ballasted in place on the base with a changeable center diorama. We used a thick piece of foam for the inner portion to accommodate the water depth, in retrospect the diameter should have been smaller as there are very few engines that will fit.
Dismal Creek Railroad 