Our local BSA district had a Merit Badge College that spanned a couple weekends. We did the Railroading merit badge, one option for the last criteria is to build a layout - which we did.
Attached is the plan and a few pics. In between sessions we had a large crowd around the layout, taking turns, but I was too busy to get a shot of the crowd.
A couple of lessons from the event: small kids can't help putting their fingers on the layout edge, so the plan we used happened to have an edge between the track and the end of the board, which worked well when kids were crowding around the layout.
Also, I powered the layout using a CW-80 running two LionChief Plus locos. We were successful running two short trains on this small layout with only three rear end collisions. The CW-80 was a third operator station in addition to the two LC+ controllers - that person was in charge of dropping power to the layout when a collision was eminent. One small girl even put the CW-80 on her lap and became an expert at telling engineers how to monitor their train speeds. An unexpected surprise bonus! I have to recommend if you try a public layout with multiple engines.
The two LC+ locos worked well, even through the speed match was not perfect. Kids loved the LC+ controllers, as others have reported, and needed almost no instruction. As I have previously pointed out, having the whistle/horn on the same button as the trailing remote coupler is asking for trouble - unintentional uncouplings at speed. We had a few of those, and the master power controller at the CW-80 saved our bacon when that happened.
Overall it was fun, 7 guys completed the merit badge requirements (there is a good bit of book learning), and lots of kids had a lot of fun running trains.
