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I hope you’re in a safe spot, away from tractor trailers whizzing by. Thank goodness for AAA and favorable weather.
Yep I pulled off where the one salt thing was and of course I had a spare tire and the tire iron but no jack lol. AAA changed it for me and I’m here at the show.
There needs to be a better system for this as it’s very time consuming. Could be the motors being tired too from all day running but I for one am not going to spend the whole time managing those trains.
Welcome to staffing life. While yes it can get annoying, it comes with the territory. My guess is you were actually replacing batteries when you should’ve just been allowing the train to cool down a bit (typically they are good for two 1 hour 15 minute runs depending on what they are hauling). Having the 3 power functions rechargeable boxes did help considerably.
It will be the st Patrick’s day parade, and John singer will attest to the flood of people as a result. The more the merrier for Saturday, for sure.
Its a No from me dog… In all seriousness though I hope everyone who can staff for Saturday will. I have no doubt with the incoming nice weather it will be incredibly busy.
No issues with the RC trains last night. Crowds were light so we only ran one of @playingwithechoes trains at a time. Challenger 3985 (Blue – inside loop) ran exclusively on the rechargeable battery boxes and got about an hour and a half out of each charge. With 3 of them there now we had no issues keeping up with recharging.
We only ran Big Boy 4005 (Red – outer loop) once on the rechargeable AAA batteries, essentially to give the Challenger a break. Same run time of about an hour.
Glad to hear no trouble, @rcgrier3406. Keep me posted.
I plan on bringing the vintage Circus Train on Saturday to have that running for a while as I dust out the Big Boy internal drive train.@joshhall, I’d like to borrow the RC race car and controller again Saturday morning to do a reshoot of a scene for the LUG compilation vid, if possible. 🙂
Thank you, @watchwmarcella. He has been discharged and is recovering at home. I will there for teardown on Sunday. Does anyone have an ETA on when we can get onto the floor with cars?
I will there for teardown on Sunday. Does anyone have an ETA on when we can get onto the floor with cars?
@timf, best guess is around 7 pm. The show runs until 6 pm, and they usually make us wait until the Farm to Table area clears out before letting us bring cars in. We’re in Group 8.
Bumping this forward in case you’re able to help staff this weekend. We expect Saturday to be the busiest day with the St. Patrick’s Day parade downtown from 10a – 1:30 p, and a Penguins home game starting at 3:30 p.
Currently we have:
Fri. 3/14: 9:30a – 3:30p – (3); 3:00p – 9:00p – (2)
Sat. 3/15: 9:30a – 3:30p – (4); 3:00p – 9:00p – (3)
Sun. 3/16: 9:30a – 2:00p – (3); 2:00p – 6:00p – (8)And here’s the link again for signing up to staff.
added the shifts.
2025 Home and Garden
Mar 3 – Mar 16
Multi day event at the convention center. huge display space for standalone MOCs and train/town collaboration. increased cup credits since it is a paid event.
Shifts Layouts Cups View Shifts (25)Empty Shifts – 7Participants – 16 We had an issue come up this afternoon with some mini-figs and a LUG truck being taken from the display. This affected Tom Garrity’s ( @thoga1109) food truck/park area and Tim Freshly’s ( @timf) Liberty Avenue building area. Fortunately Josh and Phil were here this afternoon with their families, and one of them saw a 7-8 year old coming out from under one of the table skirts in the Train area. Josh and Phil, with the help of Phil’s son, were able to track this kid down (turns out the kid is the son of one of the other exhibitors at the show), and after several visits to that exhibitors’ booth we believe we were able to recover all of the items taken.
Also fortunate was that we had pictures of those portions of the display from last Friday, so we could compare those with what was there today to determine what was missing. That proved helpful to identify what to look for. We believe this was confined to the Train area, but we did compare photos of the other areas and didn’t find any issues.
Tom Garrity has verified that we recovered all of his stuff. Tim, we have your stuff in a bag on the table for you to go through on Sunday when you’re here. Security for the event was notified, and there are security cameras at several locations around our display, so if we didn’t recover everything that security footage may be helpful.
So, for those of you staffing tomorrow or Sunday, please be vigilant as to what’s going on around the display, especially on the side where Tim’s buildings are in that we’ve kind of created a barrier over there with the buildings. If you’re staffing one of the morning shifts and can come in a little early, that would be great. This was an exhibitors’ son that did this and not a member of the general public. Tom Garrity is coming in early tomorrow to keep an eye on things until one of our other members gets there but cannot do that on Sunday so we need help there @argonvesher and @rengawmk if you can. Thanks!
a 7-8 year old coming out from under one of the table skirts
(turns out the kid is the son of one of the other exhibitors at the show)
Was it one of the Lumber vendors by chance? I ask because the last time I staffed (Sunday I do believe) there was a kid about that age from one of the Lumber booths who was talking to @gabevistica for what seemed like hours about where to buy bulk minifigs and what not. Just curiosity on my end is all.
Tear down started at 6
I left the convention center with a packed truck at 7:30.
I left my house with an empty uhaul at 9p.Record breaking pace!
I love the new big commercial cart. No one needed to carry any tables to the truck.
Lots of hands helping to tear down the modular train sections. Even without any prior knowledge of the train modules!
Such an awesome event and one of the things I love this event because we all get to interact with one another for such long periods over the course of so many days.
Anything else you’d have marked down as lessons learned? Things that worked well or opportunities to improve?
I don’t think we need to adjust much, if at all, for the thief kid- the risk of that occurring again is so low given his unique circumstances.
Dropped all my photos into Google photos, including a few faraway shots of the overall display: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wQAvUxWhQkMwMNSC7
Thanks again to everyone who helped plan, display, set-up, staff and teardown for this big event. Lots of helping hands make light(er) work! After we got Josh on the road, the rest of us had our cars packed and ready to leave by around 8 pm.
All-in-all I think this event went very well. Members stepped up to help fill in any gaps we had in the display itself and with staffing, and other than our little incident with the 5-finger discount kid things went pretty smoothly. Adding the “Worlds” section and eliminating the divide between the trains and the general display were both great additions. Gabe’s big crane, Michael’s Behemoth bridge and Tim’s big buildings were all “WOW” factors that we added this year, and I know I heard a number of comments that our display was the “best thing at the show”!!
Pictures have been uploaded to the Gallery, and fair warning between Gabe’s and my pics there’s a lot to look at!! To view them, click on the “Gallery” link at the top of any page and then click on the “2025-03 Home & Garden” folder.
I want to thank everyone for the pleasure of partaking in this show with you. I was more than happy to provide trains, rolling stock and that Behemoth Bascule Bridge. Even after extensive testing of the bridge at home, structurally, mechanically, and electronically, I was still excited and surprised to see it working at the show for the first time. My only regret is that I forget to get a pen so everyone can sign the banner and give it to Josh as a momento on Sunday. Good news is that on Sunday, the bridge was easily dismantled into three sections and cleared out of the way for everyone else to do their teardowns within ten minutes. Trains and cars were likewise collected in a quick fashion for the MILS crew to get to their modules.
As for lessons learned for future shows, I think the Powerowl AAAs will need to be replaced with Enerloop AAAs to extend run time to well over an hour. Sure, constant battery changes comes with the territory of running massive trains and large rollingstock pieces on standard PF motors and battery boxes, but I can try to help alleviate some of that by looking at that brand. And a special thanks to Bob and Josh for allowing me to use the LUG’s rechargeable PF boxes. Those helped a lot when Powerowl needed more time on the chargers. On the plus side, we figured out the Big Boy’s motors by running that in reverse on Sunday. It’s nothing wrong with the train’s technic drivetrain during inspection but rather the L motors had worn out going one direction for years on end, LOL. The train is designed for easy service repair so I’ll pick up a couple new L motors, put them on the internal mounts, and she’ll be running great again like the Challenger train.
As for the Bridge, I may tweak some design aspects to increase angle of lift to go past the usual 45 that this style of bridge does, but I was certainly pleased with how much load it carried without the slightest bend in the frame. It lifted and raised with only one L motor. So it will certainly be back for the next HG show. 🙂
And I may be able to bring more trains next time, given that this hired driver of mine has the room in his SUV for more boxes. So we can have more than just two locomotives to switch about on the layout, along with the other idea Josh has mentioned.
Thanks everyone again for coming together and producing this amazing massive display. The skyscrapers, cranes, city, bridge, and trains from where I staffed were all phenomenal, as well the huge array of awesome world MOCs on the other half of the layout. I’ll be working on that video tour of everything soon. Can’t wait for next year. 🙂
Just wanted to thank everyone for all of the positive comments on my first endeavor at being part of a LUG display. It was nice to get away from my trains for a couple nights to staff the LUG area. Thank you all for making me feel welcome and allowing me to display along side of such awesome builds.
Is there any video of the Bridge working? As I was unable to staff and shifts, I have yet to see it in action.
@timf, Michael had this video on his Phoenix Train Works Facebook page.
This was a great event! Thank you all as I enjoyed participating at the 2025 Home and Garden event.
Where can someone send me the link, directions, etc. to see how many cups were credited for any participation/event? Curious to see where I am at.
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