JRM at the National Cherry Blossom Sakura Matsuri April 13 & 14, 2024

[cteno4]

JRM will be displaying our T-Trak layout at the 61st Annual Sakura Matsuri street festival in Washington DC on Saturday, April 13, 10:30 am – 6:00 pm and Sunday, April 14, 10:30 am – 4:00 pm. This is a part of the National Cherry Blossom Festival and the 13th year JRM will have participated in the Sakrua Matsuri. The event will be held on Pennsylvania & Constitution Aves. 3rd-7th St NW, Washington DC. This the largest Japanese festival in the United States and has a huge attendance!

 

We will be there both days this year. Always a great event and tons of visitors. Please come join the festivities!
 

cheers

 

jeff

[Cat]

Ooh, if it wasn't a month before a big gaming convention that I'm prepping for, that would be a very tempting trip!

[cteno4]

Love to see you guys sometime (or if I get up to Boston).
 

But actually it’s not the best time to visit dc as lots of tourists for cherry blossom time, tons of kids starting to flow in for spring school trips, and weather is erratic. If you come for the blossoms that’s a total crap shoot each year!

 

jeff

[Dillon]

Wonderful again, pity there's no cherry blossom festival in Nevada where I live, good luck!!!

Edited March 20 by Dillon

[cteno4]

Thanks Dillon!
 

Looks like we also have two other smaller cherry blossom events as well this year. Just have to work out the final kinks with the bloody insurance! Since we are not any sort of business or non profit, just an odd group of folks we can’t get our own liability insurance for the group and have to rely on the events’ umbrella liability policy or they get a rider for us under the event/venue policy. Always a pain with cultural events that require contracts and insurance.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

12 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Love to see you guys sometime (or if I get up to Boston).
 

But actually it’s not the best time to visit dc as lots of tourists for cherry blossom time, tons of kids starting to flow in for spring school trips, and weather is erratic. If you come for the blossoms that’s a total crap shoot each year!

 

jeff

 

Wasn't all that terrible when I visited 🙂

 

Would love to visit again, maybe I need to start thinking about doing so, although that would have to be next year at the earliest..

 

[cteno4]

Yes you hit a good weather year! It was nice and sunny and good you didn’t try to wear your samurai armor or you would have melted! Next visit you will have to come decked out in it for the festival! 
 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

It's a bit of a bother carrying that around, and wearing it on the plane for 8 hours would be really uncomfortable 😄

 

[cteno4]

But entertaining for the folks on the plane!

 

jeff

[cteno4]

Sadly we just had to back out of the smaller festival, Sakura Sunday this weekend at National Harbor due to insurance issues. It was in a commercial space so they require total external insurance and would not put us on their event insurance and we could not waive all liability and indemnity them one way like their lawyers wanted in lieu of our own insurance. 
 

jeff

[cteno4]

Everything is on for JRM attending both days of the cherry blossom Sakura Matsuri!
 

An added fun event just happened. The Japanese embassy contacted us about ambassador Yamada stopping by at lunch time and they will provide lunch for us and sake toasts! They are going to rope off a little area to the side of our tent as he wants to do some little ceremony about us being such good cultural ambassadors for Japan! Very wild. They are calling next week with the details. I expect most every member of the club will show up for this! Sushi and sake with the ambassador! We have met most of the ambassadors over the last 20 years at events like the Sakura Matsuri and Embassy tours where we have had layout displays, but then it was only hand shakes and bows!

 

jeff

[RS18U]

Wow, that sounds awesome!  I am involved with a sister city society with Abashiri and Port Alberni (in Canada) and its always neat when someone from the Japanese Consulate General comes to an event.  Enjoy!

[Cat]

Wahoo Doray!

[Kingmeow]

Take plenty of pictures and post them here!!!!  (Which I'm sure you will do.  😃)

[cteno4]

Awww I had to pull a little that certain day of April joke! So sorry, no ambassador party at our tent!

 

Sorry there has been a long history of pulling April fools cranks about JRM on the forum

 

• club layout destroyed by Akitas chasing squirrels in a member’s basement 
• club layout destroyed in my car when car crashed into the tower of storage boxes
• club membership torn part of which club members get to go to whitehouse display for Japanese ambassador 

 

We may get to see him as the ambassador sometimes does a loop of the Matsuri, and they have stopped by in the past to check out our display. But the matsuri is pretty big and crowed now so he may just hit a strategic bit of it now. I’m sure they are also a lot more twitchy security wise since Abe’s assignation.

 

Btw we do have a sister club in Iwate, Japan. One of our founding club members and his his wife went over to work there for 2 1/2 years and he was a member of the Iwate Railmodelers’ Circle.
 

jeff

[Madsing]

Not fair! 😂 I knew about your April jokes but since your post is dated April 2nd (in Asia 😇)…

[cteno4]

I just made it in under the wire here in dc for 4/1!
 

jeff

[Dillon]

How was the event?

[brill27mcb]

Dillon, it was an April Fools Day posting - you've been duped. There really is no National Cherry Blossom Festival, no Washington DC and no Jeff Reynolds...

🤪

 

Rich K.

[cteno4]

Yes I am but chatGPT that has grown attached to Japanese model trains and hallucinating it all!

 

jeff

[cteno4]

Thanks, just catching up with life here after the long weekend of the event.

 

The Sakura Matsuri went off great this year. We were in a very central spot of the festival so that was nice and the weather was very good, sunny and 70-80 temp so nice. Only issue was some gusty winds at time, luckily just blew over a few unattached tall buildings on one module which were replaced or taped down. Later Sunday afternoon we did have some trains get blown over now and then when running. Our club curves are super elevated double track so trains are vulnerable half way thru the 90 to getting tipped over if the gust comes from the right direction.

 

Crowds were very heavy on Saturday as the street festival gets all the outflow from the big cherry blossom parade along the mall, so the event sort of goes from zero to 100% in a half hour on opening on Saturday. Recent years I had head figures of like 150k attendance. I think this year it was the densest I’ve ever seen it.

 

We had one of our best receptions I’ve seen with out Ttrak. Folks were just super excited, interested, and appreciative. It was fun to watch people approach and their reactions. Many got the big O mouth first then usually a lot of glee expressions and comments of OMG!, “Cool!” (that term is now back in fashion, so I am fashionably cool again as I’ve used it for 50+ years constantly), or “Sick!” Of course every third person would say “I (or family member) had a model train when I was young!” and be back to being a bit of a kid for a bit. Even if we could just give them a moment of being a kid again to recapture a bit of that now it’s a success for us. Many folks took the time to look closely at our scenes and find the fun detains and when they would discover one they would then go on the hunt for more and have great fun when they found one. I think 500 business card were taken! Folks were very praising and appreciative to us for us bringing the layout to the festival which is greatly appreciated by us as it’s a total labor of love and many times at train shows you get little praise and appreciation which really can suck the fun out of doing a show.

 

We only had a single tent this year (we had a double tent last year). They give us a tent and event fees gratis as event fee and tent rental is many hundreds of dollars and we have very little funds as a club. The tent was unfortunately close to one of the adjacent big tents that had kids art on Saturday and a fundraising bazaar on Sunday that at times cause our crowd and their crowd to clash some, but not horrible. One tent apparently didn’t have any concrete block tie downs (they always have huge 2’x2’x18” concrete blocks at each tent pole to keep them from flying off in a good wind) and went for a flight. This has been an issue in some past years as the tall buildings downtown can channel gusts.

 

It was also the first time we have left the layout setup overnight outside and of course nightmares of coming in Sunday morning to a disaster or theft of stuff. But nothing happened. The event is all fenced off and they have security all night.

 

6’ tall inflatable goji was not so popular this year for some reason. Usually tons of people have to stop and do a selfie or action shot with goji. He got some good love but not the usual. The best thing is I found this little inflator (high volume low pressure) last fall for him that is usb rechargeable and about 6x6x10cm in size and can inflate him in like 3 or 4 minutes! Very quiet as well. It can also deflate him and get all the air out of him easily, which is super hard to do by pushing the air out of him and could result in a blowout if someone was too aggressive. All for $5! In the past we alway have used car tire inflators (high pressure low volume) which are very loud and bulky or I have just sat there for 15 minutes and blown him up with my lungs. Placement of his air spigot on his my body where I needed to inflate him always drew many lewd comments at me I won’t miss! Another one of those things that you smack your head and say why didn’t we have this 20 years ago!

 

Sushi train was and especially big hit at this event and end up out and running almost all the time as it was such a crowd pleaser for this event. While not prototypical it evoked a huge ton of “oh look a sushi train!” by like every 4th person! But it’s actually one of those very fun, unique things that can act as a strong memory point in visitor’s brains to remember the rest of their layout experience. It was a way of starting conversations with visitors as you could say “That’s Godzilla’s lunch!” and it would always get a laugh (important as well to cement memories well). Striking up small conversations on various bits of the layout really increases visitor hang time and you see them take a second and usually more detailed look at things. These are the kinds of things I think are really necessary to give a good presentation and hopefully plant a few seeds out there for model trains as a hobby or just any hobby!

 

I think we were the most photographed thing at the festival at times you would look around and a dozen cellphones and cameras were going at it at once! One year at cherry blossom event a member reverse image searched a picture of layout Godzilla and he turned up in hundreds of fb posts. I expect tons more now with Instagram being more image centric. 

 

Very few finger issues. And always nice to let the little kids get their noses right up to the module edge. Most all are super good and the few fingers usually respond well to a gentle “Please don’t touch”. A new one was one little kid did not respond to a couple of prompts and the his mom tapped him on his arm and signed don’t touch to him, so good lesson there. Nothing broken just one or two maybe finger derailments.

 

We set up a rectangular layout with two 8’x30” tables side by side to create a 8’x5’ ttrak loop. This left a couple of inches of table border all the way around for small hands to grab onto or lean into instead of Ttrak modules right at the edge when you do loops with single table width. We find this presentation really beneficial for a whole host of reasons that I’ll take the time to outline here as it gobsmacked me when I stepped back and really looked at it.

• Makes a nice small 2-3” table border all the way around which is nice visually as well as place for small hands to grab and rest on instead of the modules. This strip is also nice visually with the black table cloths, it frames the layout nicely and mutes module base front differences.
• Eliminates having to lay out deeper modules strategically so as not to butt into deeper modules on the other side of the layout as well as trying to snake buss wires between deeper modules zig zagging. Set up is much faster as we just arrange modules more by scene with no thoughts to depth and this most importantly lets us layout modules so they make nice scenes together and nice transitions across the layout.
• Allows for deeper than 14” modules (some are dreaming of deeper scenes and then they don’t have to creat corresponding shallow scene modules for behind the deep scenes and also power buss routing around module backs on either side).
• If at the last minute or during a show you have to move some modules or replace a module it’s a lot easier to do than with the long format.
• We are finding the visitor retention much higher for a rectangle like this as opposed to a long 16’x30” loop. While the longer loop uses up every bit of table space and gets and you can squeeze in an extra 12 single straight modules, folks tend to get on the run around two longer tables and rarely circumnavigate it completely and stop and look at details less.
• The rectangle allows a nice over view of the whole layout within your field of vision, where as the long thin layout does not. The long strip does a strange visual thing of just screaming more of the same as well. The 4 corners seem to set more of different places on the layout and draw folks over to check each out. It helps also that our club corners are rather unique being built by one of our best modelers and are great scenes of Sake brewery, beach scene (Enoshima inspired), rice farm, and 100 yen store with bit of lake and swan boats. 
• The rectangle layout plays down the really long straightaways that long layout accentuates. The long straightaways makes the layout feel like so much more of a loop, one of the big downsides of Ttrak.
• The rectangular rectangle layout only requires 4 corners and 14 single straight modules, which is right at the amount of stuff to fit into one small station wagon or suv. The long layout requires 4 corners and 26 single straights which definitely requires 2 cars to transport.
• The rectangular layout’s shorter loop length and more of the trains (or at least their movement) usually being more in general field of view. This means trains don’t disappear for long times and more fun watching them off in the distance. Also you get 4 curves ro mix up running on the rectangle and only 2 on the long layout
• In many of our venue spaces visitors tend to end up to orienting themselves to the layout like there is a front and a back to the layout. We try to not have this, but space constraints, visitor flow and such sometimes just force a bit of orientation to the layout. With the rectangular layout of there is a front then the ends/sides end up being maximized, where as with the long layout half of the layout ends up being in the back where few venture to look at it if space is tighter.
• The rough back edge of a line of modules is much less jarring in the rectangular layout as it’s not back to back with the rough back edge of the modules behind. With the black table cloth covering the large center hole in the rectangle the two back sides are not grabbing the eye aggressively as it is with the long layout.
• The rectangular layout avoids the eye wanting to connect back to back modules on a long layout. Even with a good 6-8” gap in the middle on the long layout we have had a lot of people ask if the two scenes are connected between back to back modules or why there is a gap there or why it’s different down the layout (most folks don’t see our Ttrak is a bunch of individual modules). We did not get those question with the rectangle format.
• Center area of about 2’x5’ becomes a nice space to do other presentations. We could even put a club sign in the space. One club member brought his O scale C51 display model and a few HO locos that are just nice to see bigger. We would also put the train boxes of the trains currently running for display and ease of grabbing to swap in a new train. I could have brought my 1m Tokyo tower to go in there or eventually maybe the huge Kumamoto castle model. Anojte idea is to make a little platform to sit in there and do mini onetrak in there. Another possibility we have looked at was to do a shallow module viaduct shinkansen loop behind the Ttrak modules. But this requires a larger table rectangle and thus a lot more Ttrak modules and transporting both would definitely need two cars and a lot more storage space.
• the rectangle layout center area also makes it easy to find a convenient space to put the throttle, long layouts is a noted puzzle to where to put the throttle and where buss reaches power drops.
• Rectangle layout allows 4 nice skirt faces to put our club sign on and they center nicely whereas the sign in the center of long sides looks odd and also strange on the 30” wide ends.

In the end it’s really apparent that the rectangle layouts are the way to go for our Ttrak. Ironically it’s about the same size/shape as the nyc Japan week sectional layout we did at 9’x11’ and that was super well received and had huge visitor retention (it had two ground loops and a double viaduct). Our slightly larger layout 3.0 (still under construction, maybe next year) is based on this because it seemed to keep audiences so well.

 

Being in exhibit design 30+ years all these things are super solid design elements that are super tried and true. I’m kicking myself for not exploring rectangular Ttrak setups earlier and just slipped into the old long table format of out and back that is such the norm. I think that is driven by the desire by many to cram in as many modules and miles of rail as possible in a setup, but it does not take into consideration how visitors interact and react to the layout. This is a real lesson of less is more! This comes up all the time in design.

 

In a couple of weeks we will be trying a spiral of 4 8’x30” tables for a 10.5” square layout or a 4 table rectangle at 8’x11’ with a few more straights at the local triannual train show to see how those work.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[N-Osoi]

Awesome, I love the sushi train! 🍣 Do you have more pics of it here somewhere?

Edited April 17 by N-Osoi

[cteno4]

There’s a topic on it here

 

it’s just little sushi erasers on some Tomix TORA gondolas. Fun train. Still need to find my soy sauce tanker I bought and make some chopsticks as well as a wasabi car…

 

jeff

[beakaboy]

last weekends Model railway show in Te Awamutu which is in the Waikato district about 1 and 1/2 hrs drive from my home. Our crew took the TT layout along for a display with a couple of new modules added to the layout to make it 8m long. Some running footage here . Also managed to film the 9 Mil New Zealand Railway Layout which is very impressive , but way out of my budget. 

 

 

 

[Dillon]

12 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Thanks, just catching up with life here after the long weekend of the event.

 

The Sakura Matsuri went off great this year. We were in a very central spot of the festival so that was nice and the weather was very good, sunny and 70-80 temp so nice. Only issue was some gusty winds at time, luckily just blew over a few unattached tall buildings on one module which were replaced or taped down. Later Sunday afternoon we did have some trains get blown over now and then when running. Our club curves are super elevated double track so trains are vulnerable half way thru the 90 to getting tipped over if the gust comes from the right direction.

 

Crowds were very heavy on Saturday as the street festival gets all the outflow from the big cherry blossom parade along the mall, so the event sort of goes from zero to 100% in a half hour on opening on Saturday. Recent years I had head figures of like 150k attendance. I think this year it was the densest I’ve ever seen it.

 

We had one of our best receptions I’ve seen with out Ttrak. Folks were just super excited, interested, and appreciative. It was fun to watch people approach and their reactions. Many got the big O mouth first then usually a lot of glee expressions and comments of OMG!, “Cool!” (that term is now back in fashion, so I am fashionably cool again as I’ve used it for 50+ years constantly), or “Sick!” Of course every third person would say “I (or family member) had a model train when I was young!” and be back to being a bit of a kid for a bit. Even if we could just give them a moment of being a kid again to recapture a bit of that now it’s a success for us. Many folks took the time to look closely at our scenes and find the fun detains and when they would discover one they would then go on the hunt for more and have great fun when they found one. I think 500 business card were taken! Folks were very praising and appreciative to us for us bringing the layout to the festival which is greatly appreciated by us as it’s a total labor of love and many times at train shows you get little praise and appreciation which really can suck the fun out of doing a show.

 

We only had a single tent this year (we had a double tent last year). They give us a tent and event fees gratis as event fee and tent rental is many hundreds of dollars and we have very little funds as a club. The tent was unfortunately close to one of the adjacent big tents that had kids art on Saturday and a fundraising bazaar on Sunday that at times cause our crowd and their crowd to clash some, but not horrible. One tent apparently didn’t have any concrete block tie downs (they always have huge 2’x2’x18” concrete blocks at each tent pole to keep them from flying off in a good wind) and went for a flight. This has been an issue in some past years as the tall buildings downtown can channel gusts.

 

It was also the first time we have left the layout setup overnight outside and of course nightmares of coming in Sunday morning to a disaster or theft of stuff. But nothing happened. The event is all fenced off and they have security all night.

 

6’ tall inflatable goji was not so popular this year for some reason. Usually tons of people have to stop and do a selfie or action shot with goji. He got some good love but not the usual. The best thing is I found this little inflator (high volume low pressure) last fall for him that is usb rechargeable and about 6x6x10cm in size and can inflate him in like 3 or 4 minutes! Very quiet as well. It can also deflate him and get all the air out of him easily, which is super hard to do by pushing the air out of him and could result in a blowout if someone was too aggressive. All for $5! In the past we alway have used car tire inflators (high pressure low volume) which are very loud and bulky or I have just sat there for 15 minutes and blown him up with my lungs. Placement of his air spigot on his my body where I needed to inflate him always drew many lewd comments at me I won’t miss! Another one of those things that you smack your head and say why didn’t we have this 20 years ago!

 

Sushi train was and especially big hit at this event and end up out and running almost all the time as it was such a crowd pleaser for this event. While not prototypical it evoked a huge ton of “oh look a sushi train!” by like every 4th person! But it’s actually one of those very fun, unique things that can act as a strong memory point in visitor’s brains to remember the rest of their layout experience. It was a way of starting conversations with visitors as you could say “That’s Godzilla’s lunch!” and it would always get a laugh (important as well to cement memories well). Striking up small conversations on various bits of the layout really increases visitor hang time and you see them take a second and usually more detailed look at things. These are the kinds of things I think are really necessary to give a good presentation and hopefully plant a few seeds out there for model trains as a hobby or just any hobby!

 

I think we were the most photographed thing at the festival at times you would look around and a dozen cellphones and cameras were going at it at once! One year at cherry blossom event a member reverse image searched a picture of layout Godzilla and he turned up in hundreds of fb posts. I expect tons more now with Instagram being more image centric. 

 

Very few finger issues. And always nice to let the little kids get their noses right up to the module edge. Most all are super good and the few fingers usually respond well to a gentle “Please don’t touch”. A new one was one little kid did not respond to a couple of prompts and the his mom tapped him on his arm and signed don’t touch to him, so good lesson there. Nothing broken just one or two maybe finger derailments.

 

We set up a rectangular layout with two 8’x30” tables side by side to create a 8’x5’ ttrak loop. This left a couple of inches of table border all the way around for small hands to grab onto or lean into instead of Ttrak modules right at the edge when you do loops with single table width. We find this presentation really beneficial for a whole host of reasons that I’ll take the time to outline here as it gobsmacked me when I stepped back and really looked at it.

• Makes a nice small 2-3” table border all the way around which is nice visually as well as place for small hands to grab and rest on instead of the modules. This strip is also nice visually with the black table cloths, it frames the layout nicely and mutes module base front differences.
• Eliminates having to lay out deeper modules strategically so as not to butt into deeper modules on the other side of the layout as well as trying to snake buss wires between deeper modules zig zagging. Set up is much faster as we just arrange modules more by scene with no thoughts to depth and this most importantly lets us layout modules so they make nice scenes together and nice transitions across the layout.
• Allows for deeper than 14” modules (some are dreaming of deeper scenes and then they don’t have to creat corresponding shallow scene modules for behind the deep scenes and also power buss routing around module backs on either side).
• If at the last minute or during a show you have to move some modules or replace a module it’s a lot easier to do than with the long format.
• We are finding the visitor retention much higher for a rectangle like this as opposed to a long 16’x30” loop. While the longer loop uses up every bit of table space and gets and you can squeeze in an extra 12 single straight modules, folks tend to get on the run around two longer tables and rarely circumnavigate it completely and stop and look at details less.
• The rectangle allows a nice over view of the whole layout within your field of vision, where as the long thin layout does not. The long strip does a strange visual thing of just screaming more of the same as well. The 4 corners seem to set more of different places on the layout and draw folks over to check each out. It helps also that our club corners are rather unique being built by one of our best modelers and are great scenes of Sake brewery, beach scene (Enoshima inspired), rice farm, and 100 yen store with bit of lake and swan boats. 
• The rectangle layout plays down the really long straightaways that long layout accentuates. The long straightaways makes the layout feel like so much more of a loop, one of the big downsides of Ttrak.
• The rectangular rectangle layout only requires 4 corners and 14 single straight modules, which is right at the amount of stuff to fit into one small station wagon or suv. The long layout requires 4 corners and 26 single straights which definitely requires 2 cars to transport.
• The rectangular layout’s shorter loop length and more of the trains (or at least their movement) usually being more in general field of view. This means trains don’t disappear for long times and more fun watching them off in the distance. Also you get 4 curves ro mix up running on the rectangle and only 2 on the long layout
• In many of our venue spaces visitors tend to end up to orienting themselves to the layout like there is a front and a back to the layout. We try to not have this, but space constraints, visitor flow and such sometimes just force a bit of orientation to the layout. With the rectangular layout of there is a front then the ends/sides end up being maximized, where as with the long layout half of the layout ends up being in the back where few venture to look at it if space is tighter.
• The rough back edge of a line of modules is much less jarring in the rectangular layout as it’s not back to back with the rough back edge of the modules behind. With the black table cloth covering the large center hole in the rectangle the two back sides are not grabbing the eye aggressively as it is with the long layout.
• The rectangular layout avoids the eye wanting to connect back to back modules on a long layout. Even with a good 6-8” gap in the middle on the long layout we have had a lot of people ask if the two scenes are connected between back to back modules or why there is a gap there or why it’s different down the layout (most folks don’t see our Ttrak is a bunch of individual modules). We did not get those question with the rectangle format.
• Center area of about 2’x5’ becomes a nice space to do other presentations. We could even put a club sign in the space. One club member brought his O scale C51 display model and a few HO locos that are just nice to see bigger. We would also put the train boxes of the trains currently running for display and ease of grabbing to swap in a new train. I could have brought my 1m Tokyo tower to go in there or eventually maybe the huge Kumamoto castle model. Anojte idea is to make a little platform to sit in there and do mini onetrak in there. Another possibility we have looked at was to do a shallow module viaduct shinkansen loop behind the Ttrak modules. But this requires a larger table rectangle and thus a lot more Ttrak modules and transporting both would definitely need two cars and a lot more storage space.
• the rectangle layout center area also makes it easy to find a convenient space to put the throttle, long layouts is a noted puzzle to where to put the throttle and where buss reaches power drops.
• Rectangle layout allows 4 nice skirt faces to put our club sign on and they center nicely whereas the sign in the center of long sides looks odd and also strange on the 30” wide ends.

In the end it’s really apparent that the rectangle layouts are the way to go for our Ttrak. Ironically it’s about the same size/shape as the nyc Japan week sectional layout we did at 9’x11’ and that was super well received and had huge visitor retention (it had two ground loops and a double viaduct). Our slightly larger layout 3.0 (still under construction, maybe next year) is based on this because it seemed to keep audiences so well.

 

Being in exhibit design 30+ years all these things are super solid design elements that are super tried and true. I’m kicking myself for not exploring rectangular Ttrak setups earlier and just slipped into the old long table format of out and back that is such the norm. I think that is driven by the desire by many to cram in as many modules and miles of rail as possible in a setup, but it does not take into consideration how visitors interact and react to the layout. This is a real lesson of less is more! This comes up all the time in design.

 

In a couple of weeks we will be trying a spiral of 4 8’x30” tables for a 10.5” square layout or a 4 table rectangle at 8’x11’ with a few more straights at the local triannual train show to see how those work.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

The whole thing looks nice!!!