Arlington County Fair, 
October 5, 2002

by John Steitz

Those of you who couldn’t make it out to see our layout at the Arlington County Fair missed a good one. 

Back in June, a friend of a friend came over to me at our layout at the Alexandria Waterfront Festival and asked,

“How come you’ve never had a layout at the Arlington County Fair?”

“We’ve never been invited!” I replied.

“Well, consider yourself invited!” he responded.

Turns out, that friend of a friend was Paul Showalter, the General Chairman of the Arlington County Fair, and was in a position to carve us space for a layout.

The Fair is held every August at the Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Community Center in the middle of Arlington County, very near Glebe Road. The outdoor portion has the amusement rides, performance venues, petting zoo, pig races, games, and food concessions you would expect at a County Fair. 

But because this is Arlington, the most multi-cultural county in Virginia, the indoor exhibition (in a very large school gymnasium) is almost as big. Here are all the competitive entries in agriculture and arts and crafts, and exhibits from all sorts of commercial, governmental, and nonprofit entities. Our layout space was in what formerly had been a performance area (before all performances were moved outside to larger spaces), at one end of the hall, next to a long mirror on the wall. Vanity aside, it made our layout look twice as big!

Because our space was only 10' wide (the width of the normal 10' x 10' exhibitor space in the hall), but 45' long (see attached diagram), we concocted a long, skinny layout in the shape of a reverse “J” that ran trains in a dogbone circuit using the Red and Yellow Lines of the spine, and Matt Guey Lee’s two return loops at either end. Dave Davies’ Brunswick Yard and my own Brendel Yard (both kicked out of the Chantilly layout due to lack of space originally), Matt’s two POFFs, and two of my power plant corners completed the circuit. 

From the beginning, this was to be a DCC layout, since we hadn’t done a lot of digital running and “operations” since March. The complete main line circuit ran about 120', the same length of running track as you would find on three loops (Red, Yellow and Blue) of a 10' x 14' oval layout (about the size of our typical Fairfax Station layout). But on that 120 of main line, we had up to five trains running, plus yard switchers, more than you would typically find on a smaller, single-blocked analog layout.

One of the great things about a Mall show or a festival layout is the extended train running hours. At Arlington, we started setting up the layout Wednesday night, and finished it Thursday afternoon. We then ran trains from 7 to 10 Thursday night, 9:30 to 9:30 Friday and Saturday, and 10 to 5 on Sunday, for a total of 34 hours. As with all new venues, we exposed our club and our hobby to a whole different segment of the general public, and went through all the NVNTRAK brochures which our fearless leader (Noll) dropped off Saturday morning.

Most of the show looping featured two or three trains at any one time running right-hand rule around the dogbone. Most trains originated and terminated at Brendel Yard, and switched out cuts of cars at Brunswick Yard, using the Blue Line Track of Brunswick as a siding for those moves. Occasionally a way freight would switch the industries on Matt’s modules, and the sidings on the loop on Tuscan Red, and on Brunswick, allowed slower trains to hold and be passed by quicker ones.

But between the Blue Line of all modules, and the Orange Line running from the right edge of Brendel Yard all the way around to Wayne Jct. (where it became the Blue Line), 60 percent of the layout had an extra circuit of track. Brunswick Yard has its sidings in front of the Red Line, and Brendel Yard had....well....the entire yard off the Red Line. So when Matt Schaefer decided to run his local in the opposite direction, he was able to dodge opposing traffic (the juice train, the coal drag and two through freights)......most of the time. <g> As the photos attest, we had absolutely no fun at all. <vbg>