That sounds like fun - Enjoy! Our daughter lives in the Pittsburgh area. About 10 years ago, one of the parents at her high school in southeast Michigan formed a small group and started holding a train show to raise money for extra-curricular school activities. At that time, the state had started cutting funding to the high schools. Given the low cost to attend the show, and, the publicity for the show district wide, the show quickly became the largest one-day train show in Michigan.
Our daughter, who had recently graduated with a degree in Interior Design, worked for an architecture/design firm that specialized in building design for schools and universities. The local fire marshall was rightly concerned that the train show had become so large that the tables and other displays blocked easy access to the many fire exits.
So, without knowing, our daughter's supervisor tasked our daughter with designing the entire layout for this annual train show at the high school -- her own high school! Couple that with assigning the project to someone who had spent her life with a father who had been a model railroader all her life, and the confluence of events was pretty amazing. So, every time I went to that show, I knew that the layout had been comprehensively designed by our daughter. Eventually, the show moved to another school that could accommodate the swelling crowds. Now, due to the size of the show, there are shuttle busses to the new school location from its more distant parking lots! That'a certainly great for the hobby, particularly since there are numerous young families with children in tow. Of course, those families HAVE to visit the wonderful Glancy Trains Modular Exhibit, featuring Lionel trains!
So, cycling back to this thread, how would I better keep track of future shows in Pittsburgh so I could plan a trip to the show with a simultaneous trip to see our daughter? We were able to do that with the recent, excellent show in Pittsburgh presented by the Lionel Operating Train Society.
