Location: Plano, TX
Date: January 17 & 18, 2015
Time: 10-5 / 10-4
Admission: $8, children 12 and under free
Sponsor: North Texas Council of Railroad Clubs
Show Summary
As with most of our Dallas Area Train Shows we had a great turnout and the layout was popular with our audience. This was the first show in which we incorporated a standalone oval within the the main layout. This was great for a number of reasons. We used it as a talking point about the layout versatility of T-TRAK from a single home oval to a much larger layout.
Since this was also the first time we remembered to bring our nickel-sized NTTT Junior Engineer pins, we also used the small oval to do "check-outs" with well behaved children that showed an interest in running trains. The check-outs were quite simple but provided an opportunity to teach about realistic scale speeds and a bit about train safety. Once the check-out was complete we let the newly promoted Junior Engineers run on the mainline with DCC, naturally with supervision.
We had one significant operational issue during the show in which the layout lost power. The command station indicated track power was on, the emergency stop button was toggled several times, and we even rebooted the command station but we could not regain power to the locomotives. Finally, we checked the track leads at the command station and they popped free. We surmised that plugging and unplugging throttles at the command station caused the track leads to work free though they were still resting in their holes so they appeared to be fine. At future shows we may use a separate universal panel so that the command station is not moved around as much. Otherwise, we had a great show and spoke with several individuals who indicated interest in joining our motley crew.
Layout Plan:
