A heads up

Friday, Saturday and Sunday Tom and I will be helping staff the Riverside & Great Northern Railway's booth at the Mad City Model Railroad Show and Sale in Madison. Friday is set-up day, the show runs Saturday and Sunday and Sunday evenign it all has to come down. This is at the Alliant Energy Center, the big convention and meeting place in the state's capital. We can expect 90,000 square feet of the Midwest's biggest and most beautiful model train layouts in a variety of scales, classic toy trains, and historical exhibits and railroad videos.

The model trains layouts are amazing. Some of them have flowing water, fire departments putting out fires with smoking buildings, cars running around and trolleys as well as the trains.

Kids can help build a giant wooden train layout or run a model train. There are about 300 vendors there, mostly for serious model railroaders and collectors. We take almost our whole museum shop down. I understand it is very popular with the little kids because we are basically the one place carrying toys for children and not for grownups. (The grown-ups' model train engines and cars cost several hundred dollars apiece. We actually have toys for under three bucks.) Also we have the Thomas the Tank Engine stuff.

Alongside the R&GN booth, the Dells Live Steamers and Model Engineers Club sets up one of their 7 and a half inch Grand Scale models. Seven and a half inches may not sound that big, but it is large enough to carry fully grown men -- and lots of those guys are FULL GROWN -- for rides. The Dells Live Steamers and the R&GN have a bit of overlap in membership, and there is a 7 1/2 inch rail at the R&GN for the private use of the Steamers. These are the sort of people who show up with a steam locomotive in the back of their pickup.

Seriously.

Anyway, my real point was that Tom, Flat Matthew and I will be pretty busy for the weekend, so there may not be anything posted until this is all over.