Hi Denny & List,

There are several other reasons that some layout owners do not open their layout to visitors. One is theft, either at the moment when the layout is open or at a later time, when the thief returns after casing the property during an open tour. The second is fear of breakage, due to people always wanting to reach across portions of the layout to either point to something or to touch something.

Here in Delaware, there is a self-directed layout tour each November where upwards of almost 100 layout owners open their layouts to the tour in an area between Havre De Grace, Myld on the South to the Cherry Hill NJ and Phila, Pa. area on the north and North of Downington Pa on the west to Dover De. on the Southeast. The list of the open layouts is usually available from the larger hobby stores such as Mitchell's in Wilmington and Sattler's in NJ and a few selected other shops.

On the local tour, there has been instances of minor theft, usually because of the number of people at the layout at any one time, it was a target of opportunity with little prospect of being caught!

For some of the list subscribers who are members of the NMRA remember, there were a number of people opposed to having their names, addresses and telephone numbers listed in the NMRA Directory. This was because there were instances of the Directory used to target home layouts in the past for theft.

The third reason was that people had heard of the layout, wished to see it and used the directory to find out it's location. Then they just showed up, without calling to see if the layout could be viewed.



Tom Olsen
7 Boundary Road, West Branch
Newark, Delaware, 19711-7479
(302) 738-4292
tmolsen@...



Denny Anspach wrote: