I am not sure when our train club, Tidewater Big Train Operators, started doing shows at White’s Nursery, but we have had a layout for it every fall and spring since the Fall of 2015. It is fun to run trains there as it is only for two days, the size of the layouts is limited which means less stuff to haul around and if we have empty spots in our design we can fill them in with plants.
There are a variety of table sizes and shapes available, the one we have been setting up on for the last couple of years is 17 x 6 feet and we use a 15 x 5 oval of track. Using five foot diameter curves restricts what trains we can run. Many are designed to be able to navigate four foot curves but most of the larger engines will only run on eight foot circles or larger. The staff at White’s are very accommodating and everyone has a good time.
While we have used one or two, here and there, this was our first attempt at using all of our animated Christmas figures. Most of them are around thirty years old so, while not antiques, they are certainly vintage
Before next year Mrs. Claus is going to need some “neck surgery”. Occasionally while bending over to kiss Santa she’ll bop the big guy on his noggin pretty hard. Being so old there is probably a joint that is worn out and I will have to try and cut her clothing back so we can get to her mechanicals.
In order to fill in space and add even more motion to our layout we ran a point-to-point trolley down the center of it. We use an LGB back and forth controller and trolley on a ten foot length of track. It generally does not give us any problems though sometimes the car we try to run with it does. When we were testing our setup we were trying to use a Bachmann trolley on it that just would not stop at the end of the track. The LGB control unit uses diodes on the track to make the trolley stop, in theory with DC power the car should not be getting any juice once it goes past the diode until the controller changes the polarity of the power and the car goes the other direction. We could not figure it out so we switched over to an LGB trolley and it worked fine.
Next year we will likely elevate the track to give better visibility, plus it will give us some way to hide the multitude of cords that animated characters entail.
This was a fun layout for us. With maybe a couple of additions and some details added around the characters this may become our standard Christmas layout. While it is bulky there aren’t that many items for us to deal with and no small bits that need to be individually unpacked and repacked.
We will also need to find a second holiday train. This one train, a Piko camelback, probably more runtime on it than any other locomotive we have. We run trains frequently, both at home an at other shows, but we can rotate between all of the ones we have. It has been a very reliable engine and has a nice soundcard in it, we would have no problem getting a second Piko engine for holiday shows.
Dismal Creek Railroad 