# 2017-2018 Redford Theatre Christmas Layout



## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

I guess it's about time to get this annual thread started. For those that don't know, I volunteer at the non-profit Redford Theatre in Detroit. The Redford is a historic 1928 neighborhood movie theater that has been under renovation and restoration by its owners, the Motor City Theatre Organ Society since they purchased it in the late 1970's. It's unique because it contains the 3/10 Barton Theatre pipe organ that was installed in it back in 1928, which is one of only two theater organs in their original theaters in the City of Detroit. Organs were designed to suit the theaters they were installed in, and very few are left in their original settings. They were used in the silent film era to accompany silent movies. Since 2011, I've been constructing the annual Christmas train and village display in the orchestra pit. A friend and coworker, Mark, joined me in 2013 and eventually got suckered into volunteering with the MCTOS and is now the theater's operations manager. The train display has been an annual tradition that was started by a group of members back in the 1990's. Various issues prevented that group from doing their G scale display in the early 2000's, and I picked up where they left off a couple years later with my O gauge display. We started with an 8'x12' display in 2011, which grew to an 8'x20' display a year or so later.


It's still a little early yet, but we're already planning things for this year, and looking to start construction in late October for a mid-November reveal (during our showing of Trains, Planes and Automobiles).

At the end of our last season, we received a pretty significant donation of various Christmas village buildings and other items from the builder of the original G scale display. I purchased many of the illuminated trees and other decorations he used the year prior. Our display has gradually turned into a big group effort. Various theater members have assisted us with packing/unpacking buildings, donating items to us, and just general moral support during the construction. A couple years ago the Detroit Historical Museum donated a pretty nice portion of a collection that was surplus to them to us for use at the theater (Mark and I are members of the DHM Glancy Trains modular train group). We have also received donations from a local hobby shop owner who is a big supporter of the theater. The layout has been featured on several news pieces on the theater, and an older layout is actually prominently located in the Google Map's interior tour of the theater.

This year we plan to possibly expand the display slightly to accommodate the added structures and accessories we obtained last year. We're also looking to obtain the Lionel LCS Wifi module to go with my Legacy base to give us more operational options. The layout is set up to be run by simply turning the power on at the lighting board in the rear of the auditorium, but we do like to operate some of our fancier locomotives on evenings we work. It's tough to run the light board and then run down to the display to power things on from the Legacy remote, so the wifi phone capability would be a nice addition (plus we like new technology )

Here's a video of the first public showing of last year's layout.







I will also add this little pitch here. If anybody has any surplus trains (locomotives or cars), accessories, Christmas village buildings or other interesting items that they might be willing to donate, I'd be more than happy to pay for shipping. Since the theater is a non-profit organization, we can also give you a receipt for tax-deduction purposes. We've slowly been trying to obtain trains that are specifically for use at the theater, to reduce some of the wear and tear on my personal collection.


I'll post updates as we move forward.


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## Spence (Oct 15, 2015)

Boy the year certainly does go by fast. It seems like you just posted this. Best of luck to you this year.


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## Guest (Aug 31, 2017)

Nothing like early and good planning, Jake.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

We look forward to what you come up with this year.


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## towdog (Oct 2, 2015)

Growth can be both good and bad. As year goes by, your layout gets larger, gets more complex, and you have more hands in the kettle. I really hope that you can avoid the negative aspects all of that brings and keep it to something you enjoy.

You are doing something very enviable. It's one thing to have a layout at a trainshow for others to enjoy, but this is exposing trains to a crowd that's not already into trains. You are not only helping the hobby grow but also likely bringing back so many nostalgic members by many of the older attendees. 

My advice is to keep it simple and fun. Just because you are given structures, accessories, etc, doesn't mean that they all have to go on the layout. Switch some in and out every year. Bigger isn't always better either. There are Youtube videos ofDept 56 villages where there is so much going on that it's just overwhelming and becomes noise.

Like always, I look forward to following the updates.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Jake, what do you run, steam, diesel, modern, what?

I have some stuff, I was just looking at this one, the MTH RailKing Amtrak F59PH with Locosound. It doesn't really fit in here, and I now have a Premier one that I'll be upgrading to command, so this one is surplus. I might find a few freight cars that I can toss in as well.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Great video. It kind of reminds me of the Choo Choo Barn layout in Strasburg. PA, but not as big.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Thanks for the compliments and support guys, we have fun planning it every year.

Towdog, thanks for the good suggestions. As you mentioned, I certainly don't want the display to become cluttered. We were pretty selective in what we put out last year. A small expansion has been in the plans for a few years now, but we haven't quite found the time to do it during construction. Unfortunately we are limited by the locations of the player piano that is connected to the organ located on the right side of the pit, and the organ console itself on the left side.


John, we wouldn't turn away anything you'd be willing to offer. Last year we received a Williams Chessie System SD45 from the local hobby shop I mentioned. Locomotive wise I've just been trying to pick out the best reliable runners, since I can't always be present at shows to supervise them.


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## Steamfan77 (Jan 28, 2011)

Good luck Jake. I'm sure it'll be a hit :thumbsup:

Andy


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## Stoshu (Jun 20, 2015)

santafe158 said:


> Thanks for the compliments and support guys, we have fun planning it every year.
> 
> As you mentioned, I certainly don't want the display to become cluttered. We were pretty selective in what we put out last year.
> _
> That is one of the nice things about the layout. It's populated but not over done. The whole theater and layout is something to see.._.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Thanks Bruce and Andy, I appreciate it!


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

I would like to thank forum member Gary (Tucgary) for his generous donation of several Christmas village items to our display this year. Gary and I met up about a month ago when he visited the museum I work at during a visit from Arizona. He is originally from the area and went to many shows at the theater over the years, so there is a bit of a personal touch.

We certainly appreciate it.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

A photo showing most of what Gary donated to us.









Also a billboard I put together to honor Gary and his late wife Kathy. This billboard will go in a Lionel billboard frame and be included with this set of buildings.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

A nice start to the season... we are one of the runners up for the MTH Blue Comet award as shown in the 2018 V1 catalog. I applied for this several months ago, and was pleasantly surprised to have gotten recognition in the catalog (I knew about it about a month ago). Though we didn't win, we got a nice writeup on the first page of the catalog which is awesome for our display and the theater. 










That being said, I'm getting ready to head over to the theater to start some of the construction for this year's layout. And so it begins....


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## Stoshu (Jun 20, 2015)

_Way to go Jake.... You probably didn't win because you are using TMCC as the control system...
Looking forward to seeing it again this year....._


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Stoshu said:


> _Way to go Jake.... You probably didn't win because you are using TMCC as the control system...
> Looking forward to seeing it again this year....._


Thanks Bruce! It's hard to compete with 363 days per year with 210,000 visitors, but I'm still happy we made it as far as we did. We were competing against some big groups I would imagine


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## PatKn (Jul 14, 2015)

Looking forward to following this year's efforts, Jake.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Some slow progress on the display. School and work have been taking up a lot of my time recently, so things aren't going as quickly as I'd like, but we're getting there. This week we laid down our masonite panels we bought last year over the black stage platforms. They're painted white, so the snow doesn't look dark as it does when put directly on the black tabletops. They also help smooth out the transitions between the 4x8 tables (unfortunately since the platforms were built over many years, the tops aren't all the same material). 









Last night we worked for awhile and constructed a new 4'x6' platform to fit in the area in front of the piano in the orchestra pit. The piano is connected to the organ console, and can't be moved from it's place, so we decided to build around it. In the past, we've only filled the space between the organ console and the edge of the piano. We normally set up a folding table in front of the piano to store unused rolling stock and locomotives. I haven't quite decided what to do with the platform yet, but we've discussed a possible railroad yard, or a smaller town display. Seeing as we gained nearly 20 new buildings for this year since we took down last year's display, we needed a little more space. I don't intend to use all of my buildings since we had a lot of donations, but we will use many of them.

Next work session, a wedge shaped piece will be made to fill in the gap between the orchestra pit railing and the new platform. Working around the curved edge of the pit makes things a little more challenging when trying to use all the available space.









We also received a generous donation of some MTH passenger cars and a 2-8-0 steam locomotive from forum member "Scotie." These will be a nice addition to our fleet of equipment and give us some more options for trains to run and swap out periodically.


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## Guest (Oct 26, 2017)

Nice recognition Jake for your community service. Congratulations.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Can't wait to see it finished. It's cool that your doing that. :thumbsup:


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Thanks guys, I have a couple new additions in mind still for this year, so I'm looking forward to getting to the final product.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

A little more progress on lighting. Next steps are snow covering and track laying/wiring.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

I'm three hours West of you Jake. I would like to take a road trip to see the finished layout.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

DennyM said:


> I'm three hours West of you Jake. I would like to take a road trip to see the finished layout.


We're shooting to have it mostly done for a movie that's showing on November 16. So any movie between then and at least January it should be up and running.

Our movie listing is here.

http://redfordtheatre.com/events/

I can also arrange to give you a tour one day if we can get our schedules lined up.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

santafe158 said:


> We're shooting to have it mostly done for a movie that's showing on November 16. So any movie between then and at least January it should be up and running.
> 
> Our movie listing is here.
> 
> ...


Sounds like a plan. Plus I want to visit the guys in Holly too.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Some more progress this evening on our extension. We spent most of today hauling everything out of our storage room at the theater, and then staring at the layout trying to figure out where we want to add all of our new additions. My initial plan for the extension on the right was to construct a large park with a new ice skating rink, the carousel and the N gauge train (simulating a ride on train in O scale) from last year. Upon staring at it and trying to find a location for the On30 set I also purchased over the off season, we decided to make the extension a more rustic area with a narrow gauge train, maybe my horse barn and a few other more rural feeling buildings. 
















I still plan on doing the park elsewhere, and mocked up my new ice skating rink tonight. My grandpa put together a wooden frame for me (mainly because I haven't had any time to work on such a thing) which will hold the 12"x24" piece of white translucent acrylic I bought on Amazon. Beneath that will be some LED strip lights which have the ability to change color with a remote. It's a little intense, but we'll work on fixing that later when I do the final assembly. The frame was painted grey tonight to simulate concrete, and I'll probably embed it in the snow somewhere so it looks like a nice park ice skating rink. I've never had a good place to display the many ice skating figures I've acquired over the years, so this fits the bill.









The fountain in the center is an idea I'm playing around with. We'll have to see what the final verdict is.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Looking good. At the next club meeting I'm going to suggest we have a day trip and come see it.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Last night I worked on doing some electrical work and track layout. We still have a little work to do before the trains run again, but we have tracks assembled, and feeder wire solder joints on the track sections repaired.

Our big project last night was dismantling our former control panel board that I built a few years ago. With our new extension to the end where the controls originally fit under the platform, we no longer had the space for that setup. I purchased a cheap cabinet from the local Meijer store, and we modified it to suit our needs. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Eventually I want to add LED lighting to each shelf to make things more visible, but I'm more concerned with finishing the layout at the moment.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Looks great Jake, do you lay down on something to operate the controls sideways?


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

gunrunnerjohn said:


> Looks great Jake, do you lay down on something to operate the controls sideways?


Thanks!
We enjoy the challenge :laugh: Plus with the Legacy Wifi module, we don't have to use the transformer controls very often


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## Guest (Nov 16, 2017)

Looking good, Jake.


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## Wabashbud (Jun 25, 2010)

Jake:

When will the display be open to the public?. I am in Florida but my wife's sister lives in Canton and would love to see it. If the schedule is set give me the days and times she can see this great layout.

Thanks,

Bud


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## Santa Claus (Dec 23, 2016)

How is that fountain going ?


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

I apologize for the late reply to the posts above, somehow they slipped through the cracks when I was looking at the forum.

Bud, the layout will probably start running during our shows tomorrow (Saturday, 11/25/2017). It won't be completed fully, but the buildings will be out and the trains running. It will be finished however, for our first Christmas movie. Our schedule of events can be found at the link I'm providing below. The trains operate at every one of our normal shows through December and usually in January and February.

http://redfordtheatre.com/events/

Santa Claus, we love how the fountain looks. It adds a lot to the end of the layout it's installed on. The LED's look somewhat awful in photos, but it looks awesome in person. I'll have pictures of it on the layout in my next post.


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## Frankfordjunction (Dec 11, 2012)

Nice video, Jake. Good luck with your presentation. It gets better each year.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

We dug in and got things done this week. It still has a little ways to go before I'll call it complete, but it all operated for our two cartoon festival shows yesterday. At this point we're about 55 hours into construction. That number does include our shopping trips for various supplies as well, but the layout itself did eat up a good portion of the time. I still have to unpack all the trees and install and wire in our street lights, billboards and a few other things.


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## Jeff T (Dec 27, 2011)

Good Work Jake!!! :appl:


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## towdog (Oct 2, 2015)

Awesome, as usual. Besides the ice rink and the new buildings you received, were there any other big changes or additions this year? Any things you are doing differently as you learn lessons from the previous years?

Looking forward to following the pictures for this over the next month. Great job.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

towdog said:


> Awesome, as usual. Besides the ice rink and the new buildings you received, were there any other big changes or additions this year? Any things you are doing differently as you learn lessons from the previous years?
> 
> Looking forward to following the pictures for this over the next month. Great job.



Thanks guys!

As far as new additions... the platform in front of the player piano where the ice rink sits is brand new. The layout used to end pretty much at the right edge where the upper level platform is. The new addition added another 4x6 feet plus a little more where we filled in the gap along the curved railing. Our trolley line got moved from the main platform to surrounding our "park" scene on the new extension, which opened up a little more room for buildings in our downtown area. I only had a couple buildings I didn't utilize this year, which was a lot less than I thought I'd be leaving off the display. We managed to fit around 50 buildings on the display, and it doesn't really feel cluttered.

We also added the Legacy LCS WiFi module, so we do have the ability to run things from our phones if needed. So far I've found it to be handy, but a bit more cumbersome than just using the legacy remote. I have used it quite a bit though when I didn't have the remote nearby.

All my feeder wires run to terminal blocks along the bus wire and in the past I've just used the stripped wire ends under the screws, so this year to make things easier I used crimp on spade connectors for everything, which though it took time to do the crimping, made the actual hookup a lot faster.

Taking a lot of time with the track wiring has really helped keep things operating reliably, so that's where we usually focus our improvements. The last few years everything's worked pretty well without much change. The whole process has definitely been a learning curve, and we usually find a few things to improve on the next year.

I'm not sure if I mentioned previously, but we also have an On30 Bachmann freight train that runs into the upper level tunnels, so we're now up to seven tracks with three different gauges operable.


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## Magic (Jan 28, 2014)

It's looking super nice Jake, as always.
Very cool additions this year.
It's come along way from your first setup.

Magic


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Very nice. I love the night lighting, that really must be great in person.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Thanks Magic, and John. Somehow your posts slipped under the radar and I just saw them.

As of today, it's about as finished as it can be. Tomorrow will start the holiday movie season.


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## PatKn (Jul 14, 2015)

Looks Beautiful, Jake. Nice job. :appl::appl::appl::appl::appl:


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

PatKn said:


> Looks Beautiful, Jake. Nice job. :appl::appl::appl::appl::appl:


Thanks Pat!


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Chevrolet used our layout to film this short Ad they posted on their Facebook page on Christmas day. We thought it was pretty neat to be featured in an Ad for a major car company.


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## highvoltage (Apr 6, 2014)

That's cool, congratulations.


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## Guest (Dec 30, 2017)

Really cool ad, congratulations.


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## Bill Webb (Sep 14, 2015)

Really neat ad Jake. Congratulations on being an important part of it. An unexpected bonus.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Thanks guys. It was a nice surprise when we found out about it, and we got to be present for the filming. Though it wasn't stated in the video that we were the location for the filming, its still cool knowing that probably several hundred if not thousand people saw it in addition to our visitors at the theater.


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## Jeff T (Dec 27, 2011)

Great little bonus Jake!! Congrats!!


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## PatKn (Jul 14, 2015)

Congratulations, Jake.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Another season of trains has come and gone at the historic Redford Theatre in Detroit. Our February 9th and 10th shows were the final public viewings of the layout for 2018. It operated for a wedding rental the following Saturday and was dismantled that Sunday.

We think this was probably the best layout we've constructed thus-far and had very few reliability issues. We received some generous donations of Village items and trains (to be utilized next year after some work is done) and expanded the layout by six feet. Donations also included some cash to put towards new equipment for the layout, this includes some extra money we gained from the collection jar during our evening train gathering with train club members and other friends. I'm hoping to purchase another Williams locomotive for next year with those funds. Thanks to all who contributed through donations and positive comments on the forum, we certainly appreciate it, as do our many annual visitors. Last year we had over 16,000 visitors through the theater while the layout was up, we attained a runners up position for the MTH Blue Comet Award. We should have a tally of our visitor count for this year soon. This has turned into a big community effort in terms of assistance with acquiring supplies to build the layout. Our visitors love checking out all the new additions and changes every year which makes building this display very worth the crazy amount of time and work we put into it.

Here are some photos taken the Sunday after the final public show by my dad during a final photo session before the layout came down...


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

A few more...

























































I decided to pull my car closer to the layout to make loading my train collection a bit easier.... it made for a fun photo opportunity. :laugh:


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## PDDMI (Oct 25, 2015)

*JAKE...FANTASTIC!!!*

And great photos by your Dad too...I especially like the wide-angle shot...:appl:


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

PDDMI said:


> *JAKE...FANTASTIC!!!*
> 
> And great photos by your Dad too...I especially like the wide-angle shot...:appl:



Thanks Paul! Photography is his biggest hobby so he enjoys having things to take pictures of so he can experiment with different techniques.


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## Magic (Jan 28, 2014)

Jake it sounds like your operation has taken on a life of it's own.
Congratulations on a very successful project.
Looks better every year.

Magic


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Jake that layout was absolutely *FANTASTIC!!*.


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## santafe158 (Jul 14, 2010)

Thanks guys!


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