Happy Daisy Garden Center

We have a new location for putting on train shows – the Happy Daisy Garden Center in Elizabeth City, NC. With the closure of White’s Nursery in Chesapeake VA earlier this year the Tidewater Big Train Operators (TBTO) club lost a venue where we had been setting up smaller shows for over a decade. The owner of the Happy Daisy nursery is also a model train fan and participates in the Albemarle Model Railroad Club, running “O” Scale trains; he enthusiastically extended an offer to the TBTO to set up layouts in the showroom area of the garden center.

Our model train club hosts an annual holiday train show that has been occurring for almost 30 years and also participates in most of the convention center train shows in the area; however, those are significantly larger undertakings (the holiday show occupies an entire gymnasium).

When the Engineer and I joined the TBTO, we resolved to limit our participation in shows to what we could transport in our vehicle. It’s very easy to get carried away when given an 8 by 24 foot space to create a layout with a week to set up for the holiday show. We struggled to adhere to our resolution; we’ve constructed five layouts for the club’s holiday shows, and by 2019, we required a pickup with a trailer and a Chevy Suburban to transport all of our supplies back and forth.

Last year, we implemented a much simpler layout in the central common area for the show; however, living in North Carolina while the show was in Virginia resulted in extensive driving and late hours. So going forward we’ll help with setup and takedown and be there a few days to help out but it is unlikely we will be doing anymore layouts of our own. Which, with the closing of White’s Nursery, left us with no regular options for doing a layout of our own at shows.

And then (to get back to the heart of this post) we got the invitation from the Happy Daisy. <<happy dance>> There were several 8 by 8 foot tables there but we chose a 4 by 10ish foot spot to set up on. The smallest diameter curves offered by the major G Scale train companies is a nominal four foot diameter circle, which, as it is measured from the center of the track, will not fit on a four foot wide table. Over the years a couple manufacturers (Aristocraft/Hartland Locomotive Works) have put out smaller diameter track but, those are all out of production and hard to come by. We have a couple circles of the smaller track but they are both permanently mounted on small displays.

We have one more circle of track that makes a 33″ circle that hasn’t been designated for a display yet so we used half of it to incorporate into a point-to-point track on our 4 foot wide table. The rest of the layout was filled in with a gingerbread/candy assortment that we’ve collected…