Although I and my older brother had Lionel train sets as kids, we never really visited any store layouts. Our sets came from a toy store called Thrift Town on Nostrand Avenue (between Ave. L and Ave. M) in Brooklyn. They didn’t have a display, just boxes behind glass. My mother knew one of the owners, so she always got a good deal!!!. I do remember my Dad taking my brother and I to the Lionel showroom on 26th Street around Christmas (unfortunately, the showroom was long gone In 1978 when I started 34 years of working a block away 
). I‘ll never forget the giant steam engine face as you entered the showroom.
A few years later, we started going to Madison Hardware on 23rd Street. Now, anyone who ever visited Madison will remember that it was a crowded zoo on a good day... around the holidays, the zoo was on steroids!!! It seemed that everyone and their uncle suddenly realized that they needed to get a new train (or get an old treasure repaired) to run at Christmas. Definitely tried to avoid Madison between Thanksgiving and New Year!!! And the closest they came to a layout was the operating skating pond in the window.
During my younger years (the 60’s - early 70’s) we always made a Christmas visit to FAO Swartz on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan. They did have a small layout, but no Lionel... they carried something I had never heard of at the time - LGB Trains. Big and very colorful compared to Lionel at the time, but too European!!! The major department stores in downtown Brooklyn were Abraham & Strauss and Martin’s... A&S had Santaland in the Toy department, but I don’t remember any trains.
One of the next places I frequented was Trainworld. They first opened in a relatively small storefront on Ave. M and East 16th Street in Brooklyn, right next to the Ave. M station on the Brighton Line subway (at that point, elevated). I lived a couple of blocks away and took the train to/from that station going to college and later to work for many years, so dropping in when I got off the train on the way home was a frequent necessity. Again, they didn’t have a layout, but they did have three walls of shelves which went from around counter height up to the high ceilings, and all were filled with trains, new and used. The memory still makes me drool 
. Got a lot of MPC from Trainworld. And like Madison Hardware, not a place you wanted to find yourself around Christmas unless you had a lot of patience!!!
When I moved to Northeast PA in the mid 90’s, I found Grzyboski’s (which is a fairly short drive away) and various internet dealers, mostly from this forum... again, no layouts (Grzyboski’s new store does have a small layout, but it’s rarely running when I drop in).
But the lack of Christmas layouts never dampened my love of trains 
