I agree! I posted this yesterday on another thread but I think it is more relevant here. So with apologies for the “double post”:
My family and I had the pleasure of visiting Staver Locomotive Saturday at an open house. As one person said in another post, it has to be seen in person to fully appreciate, and they were right — photographs alone just cannot do the facility justice.
A couple observations:
There were a number of visitors from the other event across the street who were totally unaware of the news about Garden Railways and Marc, who were in the dark about Cordless Renovations and other vendors closing their doors, who had yet to take a position in the ongoing debate between track power versus dead rail, or lamented the lack of NMRA LS standards, or who even knew what large scale live steam railroads were for that matter. But they all appeared to be pretty fascinated by what they saw.
Perhaps no more so than my son-in-law, Aaron, who took excellent video of one of the trains operating, and started designing a layout as we stood there. He had never seen a LS layout before but he was enthralled by what he saw and is looking forward to NGRC 2019. (In the interests of full disclosure I do need to report that Silas, Aaron’s four-month old son and my grandson, was less impressed than his daddy, but we’ll work on him.)
Many, many thanks to Karl and Jenn for their gracious hospitality, and of course for all the incredibly hard work they, Joe, Larry, and the rest of the crew put in.
All in all, it was quite uplifting for those of us who sometimes fret about the direction our hobby seems headed.