In the News
2006 National Garden Railway Convention Onsite Report
Jul 8, 2006
By Noel Widdifield
LSOL.com Managing Editor |
Author
Bio
The first few days at the convention have been very busy for all of us. We have been on many Layout Tours and have posted pictures of many of these layouts on the LSOL.com site.
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The first few days at the convention have been very busy for all of us. We have been on many Layout Tours and have posted pictures of many of these layouts on the LSOL.com site. We hope you have enjoyed viewing them. Yesterday I took several pictures to provide a feel for how the convention is laid out here in San Jose. Many of you commented favorably about a similar series at the Queen Mary Show, so we thought we would do it again. The show is being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, which is just a short distance from the San Jose airport. The Center is attached to a Hyatt Hotel and is a very beautiful place to hold a convention. You enter the hotel through an entrance from The Great American Expressway. 
You turn right at the check-in desk and precede through a series of halls to a lobby area for the convention halls A & B.   
As I was walking though the halls, I noticed one of the San Jose light rail cars passing in front of the convention hall entrance. The car is hard to see, but is on the left under the tree. I will try to get a better picture of these cars at a later time.  You enter the lobby area passing an escalator that takes you up to the registration area.
The registration area is on the second floor and consists of a small lobby area and a room for registration and sales of convention shirts and hats. The hats were already sold out when I stopped by.   Passing the escalator, you proceed to the entrance to Halls A and B. 
Entering through on of the doors, you see that the halls are opened so that they form one large area for vendors and displays. These photos should give you a feeling for the size and layout of the halls.  
   
  The halls form a basic square area with one end set up so that vendors booths occupy four lines of booths running straight back from the entrance doors and then a second set of booths run perpendicular to those four rows of booths.  
  
  
The LSOL.com booth is set up at the end of the first two of the four lines of vendor booths running straight back from the doors. In the backside of the hall, space is allocated to several displays and activity areas for children. 
There are two modular railroads set up at the back of the halls adjacent to the children?s area. One is a live steam track and the other is the Bay Area Garden Railroad Society modular.    
As I was taking pictures, I noticed the crew from Los Vegas posing in their booth. They will be hosting the convention in 2007.  
Back upstairs in the registration area, I was able to get some pictures of the shirts and trolley car on sale.  
  
In rooms off of the registration lobby, I found several ?Poster Sessions?. These are posters of techniques or projects that are of interest to Large Scalers. You can see that they included several easy projects or informational material and are similar to the science projects done today in many school systems.   
   
Two of the poster sessions that I found interesting were on about making figures from aluminum foil and one on school cars in Canada. The developers of these posters were in the room and posed for me. 
   
At the ?Its It? Ice Cream Social, we ate vanilla ice cream sandwiches consisting of two large oatmeal cookies filled with ice cream and covered with chocolate. These were invented at Playland-at-the-Beach in San Francisco in 1926. Someone playing the part of a past mayor of San Francisco also entertained us. The character was someone who played an important part in the city?s development in the early days.    At shortly before six o?clock the doors to the exhibit halls were opened and the attendees were admitted to the halls for the evening. We will have more coverage on that later in the week. Top of Page
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