Carolina Train Builders

I got to Morehead just before the doors opened on Sunday afternoon to find a long line of people waiting to get in.  The word was out!  The crowd was heavy all day long until an announcement was made that the Chapel Hill Police were towing cars on Franklin Street!  From that point on the crowd was still large but wasn’t overwhelming.  At one point on Sunday it was so crowded we literally had gridlock.

We had a couple incidents on the train layout.  People feel the need to reach in a touch something or more often, point to something and don’t realize their arm is in the way of an oncoming train.  My monorail was knocked off the track a couple times but fortunately didn’t sustain any damage.

Tom Hohman’s train was knocked off the track twice but both times I was able to get the train cars put back together without any problems.  The only real casualty was Tom’s freight loading crane which a child felt compelled to touch for some reason and knocked it completely over.  The look on his face was terror and his mother was mortified.  By the time I got to the other side of the layout they were gone.  I wasn’t going to say anything to them but it would have been nice if they stuck around and at least apologized.  I couldn’t fix the crane so it spent the remainder of the show in a pile.

Breakdown was slow, it took me  2+ hours to get everything taken down,boxed up, and packed in the truck.  I was really happy with my packing job until i realized I had never packed the box of train track (which is a plastic wrapping paper storage container).  It should be on the bottom of the pile but nope,  had to stick it in the backseat with the kids!

I should have taken my big camera, my little Nikon is fine for close up but it doesn’t take very good pictures at a distance.  I have a bunch of pictures but a lot of them are a little fuzzy.

More pictures are on Flickr.