This is usually a good show and fairly close to me. If any of you plan to attend and would like to meet up, let me know.
A few shots from yesterday Show was well attended This was the main room with vendors, the Lego club and a modular HO layout but there were 3 other areas with vendors and one more room with modular set ups. HO Lego N
Some train show observations. There were more majority N scale vendors than I have seen at a show in a while. That was good. The down side is while they all had show discounts, for the most part, you could order the stuff on line and even with shipping get it cheaper. Most but not all added the local sales tax to the purchase. I've noticed that more with on line as well so about even there. The show seemed to max out the space at the location for the first time in a long time. That's good. The cost for tables for the vendors was $80 a table. Seems high but what's not these days. Of course that doesn't help with prices. There has been a guy at the last few shows that has nothing but vehicles. In N, he had Atlas, Oxford Diecast, and a few of the Norscot (or whoever makes the now) construction vehicles. His prices are decent and he had a nice show as always. I got a few Oxford vehicles (pic below) One N scale vendor was all retail + on pricing. They had a nice selection of weathered cars that were a bit pricey for my taste but I did see folks buying them. They had some Scale Trains autoracks which was a surprise. Anything Scale Trains is a rare find at a show these days since they pretty much went to the buy from Scale Trains model and only have a hand full of stores they distribute to. I did get one of the autoracks from them at the full retail price. Sold as new but I opened it up and could tell it's been out of the box before and possibly on the rails. No biggie since it is still like new but that probably explains why this vendor had them. Another vendor had some zip lock bags of 5 autos per bag at $10 a bag. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Well, they were cars that I bought two sets of off the Amazon river for about that price. The difference being is each set I bought had 40 cars. Guess a few of those would pay for one of his tables Not bashing the guy here as I get they need to make dollars but that one was a stand out to me There were no book sellers or video sellers at this show. There was one booth with mainly hats, some shirts and other misc. RR items. A couple of the Atlanta area LHS's that are usually at the local shows were noticeably absent this year. To me, that was bad. One N scale modular set up, two HO modular set ups, and a Lego set up were there. I was a bit surprised there was no T-trak set up this year. Overall, it was a good show. Saw a few folks I know and enjoyed looking through all the stuff and checking out the modular set ups. Here are the Oxford cars that followed me home.
Those are really nice, very fun prototypes. Thanks for the show summary. Ya just never know these days. I find few books at shows and when I do, they're often the generic "Books A Million" type.
