GATS 2004 Tucson

On February 7 & 8th 2004 Tucson held the Great American Train Show at the Pima County Fairgrounds. This show has been and annual event for years at the Fairgrounds. There were three clubs involved, Tucson Ntrak, Carl Sowell along with the El Paso Club, and Larry & Mary Davis of Prescott Valley Arizona Ntrak. This particular show was the first that Tucson Ntrak 'went big' on. For the previous shows, the club set up smaller, more managable layouts, but for 2004 we decided to expand. The layout was about 16x100ft. While the set up went ok, it took alot more work to assemble. There were alot of module problems, poor jointer track, loose wires, bad loconet cables and to top it off, for Tucson, it was very cold weekend. We did eventually get some trains running on the last day and we did learn alot from the experience. All in all it was a highly sucessful failure. We recieved a 2nd place ribbion. In 2005 things would be alot different, with more inovation and a even bigger layout. During freezing cold Set up night, overview of layout During freezing cold Set up night BNSF tank train Tank train passes new UP flag units (kato custom paint) Alaska's pass UP units Tank train BNSF DPU's heading up the rear Under the timber bridge Stack train pulls past the tank train Alaskas and SP in yard CSX pulls stopped on main by the grain silo