Report from the recent layout exhibit

We had our AsiaNrail layout setup from Wednesday, April 12th to Sunday, April 16th as part of the Trains and Planes exhibit at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, CA.   With an overall size of 20ft x 10ft, this was one of the largest layouts we have done.  The layout consisted of an oval loop and a pair of long branch lines that connected to each other and to the loop through Paul's 4 way juncton module.  This was the first time I have had all my modules in the same layout at one time. 

 

I got to run my new Micro-Ace JR Kyushu 185 Yufu train that I had purchased last month while in Tokyo.  There are 4 cars to this set but we mostly ran it on the branches so we ran it in a 3 car formation.  It is shown here on Paul's Shifen Taiwan module set which was at the end of one of the branches. 

The opposite of end of the long double branch line was my Hot Springs module.  Shown here with my JR113 in Nagano colors and Hakone Tozan Railway trains sitting at the station.  I had built a new set of adjustable height legs for this module so it could be set up at the 51 inch AsiaNrail height.  The legs can also be set for Ntrak height for use in an Ntrak layout.  Another modification made to use it in this layout was to replace the sky board with a profile board so it could be viewed from both sides.

Several other modules made up this branch line and one of them was my 45 degree curved shoreline module, shown here as Paul's Hisatsu Orange Railway Type HSOR-100 passing through.

My 45 degree Highway Overpass module made it's second outing with this layout.  Shown here with Paul's Sanriku Railway Train crossing the bridge. 

It was great to have a layout at a show again after 3-1/2 years of not having any opportunities to do so.  This show also had a few other layouts in several scales.   This museum has this event during Easter week along with several other events so it was quite well attended.  It was just Paul and myself running the layout this time so we were on our feet most of the time.  I was mostly running the branch line which is why I have more photos of that part of the layout.

Shopping in Japan - Nakano Broadway

While in Tokyo in March I visited a shop recommended by one of my wife's cousins that I had not been to before.  As the title of this post suggest, it is in Nakano just a few blocks north of the station on the JR Chuo line.

The building is several floors of many shops featuring all kinds of things.  The floors are connected by escalators and I had the feeling that this building may have at one time been a large department store.  The shop I was interested in was identified by it's railway crossing colors on the front.

I had been looking for the Kato HB-E300 Buna set but it was out of stock here as it had been in all the other shops I checked on this trip.  But, I did find something that I had been looking for since my wife and I rode this train in 2017.  With the great exchange rate right now I am really happy with this purchase.  Lots of the items in this shop are resale but the operator of the shop was very good about letting me inspect the models carefully and test everything on the test track in the shop.  This will be running on the AsiaNrail layout setup next week.