Has anyone attended the TCA Southern meet?

I go to the one in Stuart FL, and they have a lot of sellers at the show. Used to go to the Lake Worth FL show but Southern TCA quit that one for some reason. Venice FL is too far for me to travel!

Lee F.

The closest show to us was always the Great Train Expo in Tampa about two hours away, so this show is practically in our backyard compared to that one. I hope the unorthodox location doesn't translate to a smaller turnout though...

Thank you for the info! This is great news, and yes I have always lamented the huge presence of smaller scales at the Tampa show. Look forward to attending this weekend 

When I lived in Florida the shows changed from venue to venue. Most shows were held at the Fairgrounds in Orlando or Deland. They were sizeable venues and the variety of product was decent. The problem was after the Southern Division stopped hosting large venue shows when Scotty moved and went into retirement and his son decided it was time to knock off doing most or all of the work, the new Host of the Orlando fairgrounds show would get first dibs while setting up and he was buying the cheap stuff before the show opened, and he commandeered all the tables at the front near the door and had a huge sign advertising that he bought trains. So one could pretty much forget about getting any leads or bargains. Just before I moved from Florida the shows started to scatter, and the only show in Orlando was small and cramped. The better shows were in Ocala at the Armory before the cut backs in military funding by Clinton shut it down, and Deland. Then they moved the Ocala show to a smaller out of the way location that I was unimpressed with. Some shows were sponsored in the south west and south east, mainly in Tampa. I went to one and felt I had wasted my time and gas driving to it and never attended another. So the thing to do is go and check it out and if its good then you know its worth your time in the future. Hopefully things have changed for the better in the last 14 years.

Gandy

This was my exact experience with the Tampa show over time. Many years back it was decent but after a while the smaller scales took over and the little O that was left was the same guys bringing back the same over priced product that didn't sell the previous year. There was an unusually good one in Clearwater a few years ago but it was a fluke as the rest just got worse and we stopped going.