Thank you all for the compliments and encouragement. I'm a known procrastinator so I'm hoping this thread will provide the necessary impetus to see it through to completion.
A few interesting notes about the display. In 1925 the retail price was $80-$100 depending on delivery point. That's roughly $1200-$1500 in today's money and it came with no trains, track or transformer. Minimum wage laws at that time were set at 16 cents per hour so that was a pretty hefty sum for the average Joe. I think it would be safe to say that the displays were primarily targeted to retail stores and dealers unless you were a kid whose parents were well-to-do.
In another example of Joshua Cowen's brilliant marketing skills , the catalog points out that the Price Complete of the display is equal to the sum total of all the accessories included. That is, you are essentially getting the scenic layout for "free" ... provided you purchase all the accessories at one time. This must have been irresistible to the dealer who realized that when he was done with the display he could put the all the accessories back into their boxes and sell them to recoup his money.
This is only a guess on my part, but I would say that in most cases that is exactly what happened. At some point the dealer would sell off all of the accessories to recover his investment, and the large cumbersome displays were broken up and discarded . If in fact a lot of these were sold as the catalog indicates "The demand is already tremendous"..this would account for the small number of displays which have survived. The Great Depression and WWII lie just ahead, where the preservation of a toy train board would seem rather unimportant.
