JRM at 2015 DC Sakura Matsuri Festival - National Cherry Blossom Festival - April Fools!

[cteno4]

Well its that time of year again! JRM will be going back to the National Cherry Blossom Sakura Matsuri Street Festival for the 7th year in a row now! The Festival is April 11, from 11am - 6pm.

 

Its a great one day event, last year 160,000+ visitors to the festival. Takes place on Pennsylvania Ave in DC between the white house and the capital building, quite the scene! Loads of food and cultural displays and performances. the event is the peak of the 3 week + National Cherry Blossom festival that happens here in the DC area to celebrate the Cherry blossoms given in friendship to the US in 1912. The cherry blossoms around DC have become part of the fabric that is Washington.

 

Hopefully we will be sandwiched between the JR East and JR West tents as in past years.

 

So if you are in the DC area please come and visit! Bring some trains to run. In the past we have had Krackle Hopper, Rapit Bunny, and Miyakoji come and visit us at the festival.

 

Cheers

 

jeff

 

more info: http://www.sakuramatsuri.org/

Edited April 3, 2017 by cteno4

[brill27mcb]

Does that make you JR Central? :)

 

Rich K.

[cteno4]

well we are sort of a neutral ground between them! they usually have 10x10 tents and we are 10x30 so it allows them to be near each other but not next to each other and whats in between attracts everyone in and gets them into train mode!

 

jeff

[cteno4]

Well we may not be neutral ground, like Apollo 13, Houston we have a problem here... I'm in a little shock, but just trying to do something with myself for a bit here to calm down.

 

This morining I was running late for a dental appointment and jumped into the Prius to go. Well I thought I had put it in reverse (the Prius shifter is a small knob you push one direction or the other), heard the beep beep (but it turns out that was from me not yet buckling my seat belt, not the reverse beep), tapped the gas to back out of the garage, but proceeded to go forward into the the 8' high pile of all the JRM layout boxes and mountain piled up 6" in front of the car. Very large cascade of crashes and bangs all around...

 

Left it there and went off to the dental appointment.

 

Just spent the last couple of hours pulling apart cases and seeing the damage. Dorothy drove the Prius over to the dealership to get estimates on the dented hood and roof and cracked windshield. The laundry basket of the heavy stanchion bases was up at the top and that hit the windshield and roof and I think caused the cracked windshield. Guy thinks $2.5-3.5K all in as hoods and roof panels are replaced not repaired usually with dents like these. Ouch.

 

Matthew is coming over later to help assess the layout damage. One module base is crunched as it's box was between the bumper ans heavy steel shelves behind them. I do have one spare module base that was the prototype so we could move track and surviving scenery to it. Luckily it was not one of the trapezoidal corner modules, those are a pain to cut out! Other modules mainly have damaged buildings and scenery. Viaduct track is stripped from the container yard modules so those supports and working needs to be redone.

 

Luckily I had all the boxes of tomytec building and the other taller building separate as they were just off at a ttrak show and on those modules. They normally live I the layout boxes (caskets we call them) and would have been really up high in the pile. That would have been a chunk of change in damage as well.

 

Our lovely hand painted 10 year old JRM sign also got a nasty fold and crack across it.

 

The mountain lives at the very top about 8' up. It ended up hitting the rear roof, you can see the impression of it) and the rolling off the back of the car onto the driveway. It's great texturing curt did is pretty torn up and some chunks knocke off the tunnel entrance. It's salvagable as I built it pretty strong with some plywood layers embedded into the foam layers, but I fear all new texturing will need to be done.

 

I guess it's good news we never keep trains with the layout.

 

I'm still in a bit of shock. I first just did little normal things to try and calm down after getting back and in piling the layout mess and did not dive into doing more until Matthew comes over later today. It's a bit cathartic to write it all down here and helping me to collect myself. Just about every time I park the car up against the layout the thought goes thru my head that if I were to slip it would be layout disaster. Well it took 10 years but finally did happen...

 

We have a week and a half until the festival and I hope we can get things patched up well enough to show. Luckily the weather just started to warm up so we can work in the garage if we need to.

 

I have a set of rather awful pictures, but until we talk to the insurance I'm not going to post them, I guess if you are morbidly curious pm me and I could email them. In some ways it's kind of funny to see, but then the horror of all that crunched work wells up.

 

Let's hope for the best, lesson learned, find a better place to store the layout... I may not be around the forum much for the next could of weeks. That is if the other club members don't string me up.

 

Jeff

[cteno4]

Wow just reread this and it scared me how detached I am with this. Never felt quite this way before.

[cteno4]

Sorry to dump this hear, just felt like I needed to talk it thru w.o someone standing there. Going to have to do that with all the club members this week.

[1954G]

Wow.  I'm sorry that that happened, the timing really couldn't have been much worse.  I can only imagine how awful you must feel right now.  

 

That being said, I believe that you and the club can cobble together something acceptable in time for the festival.  

[cteno4]

1954g,

 

thanks im pacing around right now trying not to go out in the garage and start until matthew shows up here a bit later. feel like ill loose it if i go out there anymore on my own.

 

Yes i hope we can get things running for the show. we are good at doing on the fly layouts so we can always patch things up that way. Mountain is the one thing that is a lot of scenery work, curt spent a month of dinking on doing it so nicely with lots of rock castings and nice painting. 

 

still cant believe i was so stupid. i pride myself on not speeding when time is tight, never saves more than a minute or two which does not get you anything, but if you screw up doing it it can cost a lot -- like this. 

 

our poor cars, while we have not banged them the prius got hit in the rear panel last winter by a guy from florida hitting ice too fast (he had never seen it before i expect!) and i got hit in the drivers door by someone running a red light two years ago in slow motion luckily. the poor civic has had the roof caved in and both wind shields broken by falling branches over the years (we have a lot of big trees). this is the first one actually caused by something we did... dumb dumb dumb

 

  :BangHead:  :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead: :BangHead:

 

how im feeling now...

 

jeff

[katoftw]

Might be a blessing in disguise.  The layout will rise from the ashes like a phoenix reborn. Or whatever the Japanese version it.  Probably involves a lot of saki and those scary looking tanuki.

[brill27mcb]

Did this happen on April 1st?

 

Rich K.

[cteno4]

wish it was the case, or just a bad dream here. Matthew just left. we spend a couple of hours assessing the damages. Its all repairable, just how much time it will take. Looks like about $200 in stuff that needs replacement, materials and such so less than 1/10 the damage to the car. Matthew is talking with the club members this evening, I think ill not be in good shape by that point to deal with them. Im sure some will be pissed, but hey i was the one that had the storage dumped on me for 10 years. oh well. sorry just alternating between being pissed and really bummed right now.

 

later

 

jeff

[Densha]

Ouch that doesn't sound too well. :(

 

I think it's best to let someone else do the talk with the other club members indeed, getting angry at them because you were doing the storage won't resolve anything. I'm sure it feels like sh*t, but you can't change the past, only learn of it.

[cteno4]

Densha,

 

thanks it did not go well with a few members as they now dont want to do the festival unless we are back to 100% and i dont know if we can do that in time or not. we shall see...

 

jeff

[cteno4]

Ok rich guessed it! APRIL FOOLS!

 

Had to try something, didn't try to pull one on you guys last year!

 

Layout is safe and while the storage location of the layout is exactly as described and lurching forward would most likely cause all the destruction to the layout and car I described, it didn't happen. Bothe car and layout were safe!

 

So to paraphrase orson wells... (Well err wrong holiday but close)

 

This is Jeff, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that the car destruction of the JRM layout has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. Jeff's own version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, i couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the JRM layout before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the Sakuri Matsuri festival hopes. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that I didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. . .it's April Fools.

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

[Densha]

That was way too realistic Jeff!

 

WHY YOU LITTLE!

[cteno4]

LOL, that is high praise for me coming from Homer!

 

I thought I had worn out April fools here

 

http://www.jnsforum.com/community/topic/5917-wow-jrm-maybe-at-capital-hill/

 

http://www.jnsforum.com/community/topic/2407-jrms-new-sectional-layout/

 

Rich the bugger keeps guessing it's April fools, guess he does a lot of them himself!

 

April Fools

 

Jeff

[Densha]

I don't remember seeing the one from 2012 and I wasn't on the forum yet in 2010 so...

It was already some hours into April 2 here and I didn't realize it was still April 1 in the US at that time... oh well it's been years since someone got me at April fools and I fooled other people yesterday into something as well. :P

[1954G]

I don't remember seeing the one from 2012 and I wasn't on the forum yet in 2010 so...

 

 

Yeah, if I'd known about the forum's past April Fools shenanigans, I would have been much more skeptical.  

 

 

 

I have a set of rather awful pictures, but until we talk to the insurance I'm not going to post them, I guess if you are morbidly curious pm me and I could email them. In some ways it's kind of funny to see, but then the horror of all that crunched work wells up.

 

I should have asked for pics!  I didn't want to seem morbid, though.  

[cteno4]

It's good to get got once and a while!

 

I loved the whitehouse one as it was so easy to imagine the swirl of issues something like that would bring up! But the Akitas going after the chipmunk was also fun, that's exactly what would have happened if you put matthew's two 100+ lb Akitas in a room with the layout and a chipmunk! The car crush is a recurring flash every time I do back out of the garage!

 

Sakura Matsuri is on! We hope to see some JNS folks again!

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

[cteno4]

Yeah, if I'd known about the forum's past April Fools shenanigans, I would have been much more skeptical.  

 

i was hoping folks that had seen the past ones would keep quiet or pitch in to get anyone new to the tradition!

 

 

I should have asked for pics!  I didn't want to seem morbid, though.  

LOL, the exact trap I laid! Titilate with the idea of pictures to bolster the event but make it uncomfortable for folks to ask! When you make people imagine what it must look like, then they believe things sooo much more to be real and all the similar things they have seen before pile in as well! One of the problems with eye witness testimony and a lot of what I blather on about with the mind's eye -- if you make the mind's eye kick in with your modeling the viewers memory and imagination makes them believe there is a whole lot more in detail and scene there that there is and they will swear it's there.

 

Jeff

[Guest ___]

That was way too realistic Jeff!

 

WHY YOU LITTLE!

 

 

I keep waiting for the JR and ANA booths to start doing it; sadly, it never does.

Edited April 3, 2015 by Shashinka

[cteno4]

Well despite the April fools disaster with the car crash, all went very well at this year's Sakura Matsuri. Large crowds (seemed the same as last year that had like 160,000) with the nice weather and just getting at the peak of blossoms here. The event seems to get bigger each year, its now about 5 blocks of Pennsylvania and a couple of side blocks.

 

We were sandwiched between JR East and JR central as usual. It seems to work out great to draw folks in to the train stuff like this and JR East visited and told us they were very happy with the layout drawing so many at last years Grand Central show and at the festival here and they love being near us and that it got folks thinking trains! That was super nice to hear from them. The previous NYC JR East executive director (who got us up to the NYC show) sent us a 2015 Tomix catalog for the club thru the new staff that were at the Festival. We hope to be able to do more with them in the future, they have been super warm, inviting and supportive.

 

Public was great, no problems at all an layout ran super with i think only one bad derailment all day! We had a unitram loop set up for kits to run and thats always enjoyed by even the big kids! Since the layout is only viewed by one side at this show we fill a lot of the stuff on the back side to a cantilevered section in the middle behind the station.

 

Not as much tourism and technology question but that was probably because JR East and JR central were on either side of us doing all that stuff! Goji on the tent roof always helps as everyone has to come over to see what is going on with him. would be great to have an inflatable shinkansen to put up there! also as you walked around you would hear folks on cell phones saying to go meet up by the godzilla!

 

Still great fun for the 7th year now.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[cteno4]

Ack, forgot to mention Miyakoji came down to visit us for part of the afternoon and see some cherry blossoms! Great to see him again, he was able to visit with us last year at the Sakura Matsuri and also at Grand Central.

 

Jeff

Edited April 13, 2015 by cteno4

[miyakoji]

Jeff, yeah it was good to see you too, the layout looked great.  Was there any official word on attendance?  It seemed busier than last year, maybe that's just my perception.

[beakaboy]

super impressive layout! Can't believe you only have one day to setup,operate, and pack up. I am used to 2 or 3 day Model Railway shows and usually if its local, we have an extra setup and testing day. Would love to get even a 10th of the crowd to one of our shows. So many people in those photos!!