Princeton Train show Day 1

While the crazy people were getting up and rushing off to the "Black Friday" sales. (Who in their right mind would go to a store at 3am to buy something no matter how cheap it is?) I was still sleeping soundly not worrying abut a thing because I had set The layout up at the depot the night before. "Set up" makes it sound more complicated than it is. The task took all of 1o minutes. So come the morning we got up, breakfasted and leisurely sipped on our coffee's at Coffee Corner before I made my way to the depot and finished off those last few bits that meant the layout was ready to go. The picture below shows how everything looked moments before the doors opened.

I've been attending model railway exhibitions for many, many years and it's safe to say that I love exhibiting. Not just for the "showing off" of my work. But I like meeting the people. Meeting old friends, making new ones, and there's always someone with an interesting story to tell. Like today I met a couple of people who used to work in scrap yards one of whom was involved in the scrapping of railroad cars! They informed me that it would not be out of place to feature an unfortunate fatal accident scene on the model. But I think I'll pass on that particular feature. You just never know who is looking at your layout and what information they might have to share.

After five hours on my feet by the time the doors closed at 3pm I was well and truly exhausted and headed home for a cup of tea to reflect on the days happenings. It has to be said that the layout operated pretty well considering. I still have some adjustments to do to the Kadee couplers but those that are set up right work excellently. A larger fiddle yard would be nice, even for the setting up of just a three car train. That was something I expected would be an issue. But I can't do that overnight so I'll have to wait for another exhibition to prepare that. All in all that was a good day. What will tomorrow bring? I don't know, but I expect it will be totally different to today.