My friend Tom, emailed me on Friday to let me know that there was a Train Show up in Estes Park this weekend. Estes Park is neat little mountain town right outside of Rocky Mountain National Park. With the weather expected to be nice, Erin and I made plans to head up on Saturday. Train shows are generally hit or miss with the smaller ones being more miss than hit usually.  I had been looking for a opportunity to get up to the mountains to find some dirt, real mountain type hopefully decomposed granite type dirt, for scenery.

After lunch at the Estes Park Brewery where we sampled some nice Honey Wheat and Raspberry Wheats and left with a growler, I dropped Erin off downtown so she could do some shopping while I continued back to the Holiday Inn for the show. The Estes Park Holiday Inn has a decent size (for a mountain town) convention space but the vendor tables were still strung out throughout the hotel area with the layouts primarily within the meeting space.

There were some nice layouts at the show. Almost all of which I had seen previously at the Denver Train Show. There were even two nice On30 layouts. One had a working sawmill that cut scale size planks. It was a crowd favorite. There was also a nicely put together Scottish themed layout by the Estes Park Club complete with kilt wearing club members. The scenery was great and the top castle picture was from that layout.

The vendors on the other hand were a disappointment. Old model railroad stuff apparently never gets thrown away and instead gets carted around and attempted to be sold at train shows for the next 20 years. The Tyco box car from 1976 was not worth $5 new and certainly is not worth it now. Model railroad technology has come so far in the last ten years it makes the older stuff worthless unless we are talking about brass steam engines of course. If I ran Train Shows I would screen the vendors and throw out anyone that brought old Tyco equipment, anything with Horn Hook Couplers, Atlas Switches complete with above table snap switch machines, or Brass Snap Track. Any beginner that was unfortunate it enough to bring it home would most certainly leave the hobby in short order.

There was a couple of tables with some unique old books, pictures, tools, and modern DCC equipment. I did not buy anything though.

Overall, I give the show high marks for the quality of layouts and the great job they did to engage the kids with a treasure hunt game. The vendors were a disappointment, as usual.

Next stop – The Great American Train Show Feb 23-24 in Denver.

The picture is on the left is rather poor due to not using a real camera but instead using my BB.

On a different note – Has Ebay killed the train show dealer? The quality of dealers not only at this show but many of the ones I have been to in the last couple years has been suffering. There is NO variety and much of the inventory seems to be same crap they have been dragging around since the mid 90’s. Guess what? We didn’t want your overpriced toy quality crap at the last show and we won’t want it at the next ten shows.

How about some quality stuff? On30 has exploded in the last couple of years but there was almost no items for sale. How about some O scale detail items and figures? How about scratch building material or scenery products? I am okay with the Thomas the Train booths as there are so many kids it only makes sense but if you are catering to the serious modeler, get rid of the crap!