A short, or maybe too long, of a history of “the Alcove”.
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Jan and I started going to the ECLSTS in 2001. In those days it was held on a Friday evening opening at 4 pm and going to 9 pm and then back open at 9 am on Saturday morning, closing once again at 9 pm and the 10 am on Sunday and closing at 4 pm. It was a big, long show and unbelievably crowded for the 3 days. It was great fun! And that first year, we were there every hour it was open. In 2002, the hours were the same, but by 4 pm on Saturday, we had seen everything twice and realized we really didn’t have any place to sit, gather our purchases and just “kibitz”. The guys that were part of a club that displayed there had a better deal. They had a place to sit, store their purchases and just talk about the show, their layouts and everything else. Walking around the old building, eating at the snack bar and using the facilities, we could tell this place was busy and getting busier each year. To get space for these really huge club layouts, space was a premium and there were lots of discussions that the layouts could be made bigger, but room was a concern. Ron Wenger ran the show at that time and he enjoyed standing or sitting around and talking as much as the rest of us. Many of us were now heavy on the internet and our friendship were becoming a part of our daily life with the occasional talk in person at the train shows and conventions. The common denominator was the large scale trains. On the Sunday of the 2002, we continued a conversation that was started in the hotel bar the night before. Around lunch, a number of us got Ron over to the area of the snack bar. There was a big unused area between there and the bathrooms. It was an old main entrance from the early days of the York Fair Buildings and looked about like what was shown in the pictures this year. It was unused. Our discussion got around to “if we had a small layout could we put it there?” Ron said, he had little room on the main floor of either building, but if we wanted to put something in that old entrance space, that space between the snack bar and the bathrooms, that space with its own entrance and parking within 20 feet, that little indention that he couldn’t use, that little “ALCOVE” that was the old main entrance, we could have it, rent free.
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With that ammunition, email addresses were exchanged and a core group decided we could come up with something between 2002 and the show in Spring 2003. There is a lot more history, pictures and stories. Many of them have been documented on this Forum and many others. The “Timesaver” layout was built, re-built, modified, enlarged and adjusted. Searches of the “Timesaver” and “Inglenook” switching puzzles can bring up all kinds of topics, stories and videos, but that’s How the “Alcove” started.
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Our, at least, that’s how my grey matter remembers it. Other memories may be different, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
