As always, I open my layout to the general public during November as part of National Model Railroad Month, where the goal is to show off our great hobby. This year in conjunction with the open house, I worked with 2 local newspapers to publicize the event a little. Some layouts further south in NJ do this and regularly get a large number of visitors. For me and a few others in my area, just having the listing through modelrailroadopenhouse.com was only producing about 10 visitors during the 5 hours we were open. Not really making it worthwhile in my opinion.
The Burlington County Times ran a large article with a giant picture of my Hardwick, VT road crossing. The Courier Post had a smaller mention amongst a larger 2 page spread promoting Model RR Month. Here is a link to the BCT article with photos:
BCT Article
All in all, this was a success as each of of the 3 of us had anywhere from 8o to 100 visitors, and a large number of these were families with kids. So hopefully this will pay off in the future with more model railroaders join gin our ranks.
As always, I forget to take a picture during these open houses as I am usually quite busy talking to everyone while keeping an eye on the changes.