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The D.A.R.E. Model Railroad Club will have its annual open house on December 2-4 this year. The club is located in the Venetia, PA, community center at 800 Venetia Road, a little over a half-hour south of downtown Pittsburgh. The club will be running its indoor G gauge layout, an HO recreation of the Montour Railroad, several small HO and N scale layouts, and a room-sized O gauge layout. Admission is free, but donations are encouraged. The open house hours are as follows: 

Friday: 6:30 PM through 8:30 PM

Saturday: 9:30 AM through 2 PM

Sunday (tentative): 10 AM through 2 PM

If you have a TMCC/Legacy or DCS equipped loco, feel free to bring it with you to run on the O gauge display. 

Last edited by pittsburghrailfan
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Quick update: I just found out that we will likely not be open on Sunday. However, we are opening a half-hour earlier on Friday and Saturday. If there is a significant number of people who will visit Sunday, I can convince our club president to open the club on that day also. 

Additionally, there will be other events going on on the other floors of the building. 

The club is also selling some HO equipment and maybe some Grif Teller calendars. 

Finally, there may also be some cookies or snacks. 

That sounds like fun - Enjoy!  Our daughter lives in the Pittsburgh area.  About 10 years ago, one of the parents at her high school in southeast Michigan formed a small group and started holding a train show to raise money for extra-curricular school activities.  At that time, the state had started cutting funding to the high schools.  Given the low cost to attend the show, and, the publicity for the show district wide, the show quickly became the largest one-day train show in Michigan.

Our daughter, who had recently graduated with a degree in Interior Design, worked for an architecture/design firm that specialized in building design for schools and universities.  The local fire marshall was rightly concerned that the train show had become so large that the tables and other displays blocked easy access to the many fire exits.

So, without knowing, our daughter's supervisor tasked our daughter with designing the entire layout for this annual train show at the high school -- her own high school!  Couple that with assigning the project to someone who had spent her life with a father who had been a model railroader all her life, and the confluence of events was pretty amazing.  So, every time I went to that show, I knew that the layout had been comprehensively designed by our daughter.  Eventually, the show moved to another school that could accommodate the swelling crowds.  Now, due to the size of the show, there are shuttle busses to the new school location from its more distant parking lots!  That'a certainly great for the hobby, particularly since there are numerous young families with children in tow.  Of course, those families HAVE to visit the wonderful Glancy Trains Modular Exhibit, featuring Lionel trains!

So, cycling back to this thread, how would I better keep track of future shows in Pittsburgh so I could plan a trip to the show with a simultaneous trip to see our daughter?  We were able to do that with the recent, excellent show in Pittsburgh presented by the Lionel Operating Train Society.

Last edited by Dennis GS-4 N & W No. 611

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