It was honor and privilege to have Joe Stachler from TM Books and Videos in my home yesterday to video my 2014 Christmas Layout. He spent most of the whole day filming my trains and ended the day with interview with me about my layout. Joe told me my layout will be in the next video release, Toy Train Revue, Part 4. The video will be coming out in a few weeks.
Joe called me at the beginning of October wanting to film my layout the 1st week of November. That meant starting to set up my Christmas Tree on 2nd weekend of October! It felt very strange to be setting up our family Christmas tree that early especially when I had to run out to Menards on a Saturday night and had to buy a set of Christmas lights for our tree because one of my strings was bad!! Normally, I don’t begin setting up my layout until the last week October or beginning of November. I spent about 150 hours on setting up my layout this year while working 2 jobs at the same time. At the end of this last week I felt very tired and worn out!
My biggest fear was that something would fail or go wrong during the filming. To my surprise there were only a couple of minor problems such as car coming uncoupled. Joe filmed 9 of my engines yesterday…6 of them running at one time. I added smoke fluid to all the engines at least 3 – 4 times during the filming!
As much as yesterday was fun, I was tired out by the end of the day. I look forward to seeing the video, but now I can enjoy running trains and relaxing as I have the rest of week off from work!
Ken