Great American Train Show
now-defunct traveling U.S. model train show
The Great American Train Show is the name of what was, for two decades, the largest traveling model train show in the United States. The company was incorporated in 1985 and went defunct in 2006. During the 1990s, the company operated as many as 90 train shows every year in 40 different states.
Corporate history
The Great American Train Show, or GATS, was founded by David K. Swanson as an outgrowth of a monthly train show in Wheaton, Illinois, near Chicago that was itself an outgrowth of a local model railroad club. Beginning in 1982, Swanson began running train shows in cities outside the Chicago area, eventually expanding the operation to the west coast by the mid-1980s and to the east coast by the mid-1990s.
GATS was originally run as a subsidiary of the NIART company, but following incorporation as GATS Limited became itself a parent to a series of subsidiaries which existed at one point or another. These included:
Great Midwest Train Show
Great Western Train Show
Great American Travel Service
GA Technology Services
Computer Renaissance (franchise)
Computer Central
In 2001, the company was sold by Swanson to Elmo Geoghegan, a former Bob's Big Boy employee who had worked for GATS as a show manager. Geoghegan moved the emphasis of the company from train shows towards computer shows, a change which proved financially disastrous. In 2004, the company's name was changed to Great Western & Atlantic Train Show, and in April 2006 the company ceased all operations.
Operations
The core business of GATS consisted of running consumer shows focused on model railroading.
“Great American Train Show” enters the record as now-defunct traveling U.S. model train show. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Great, American and Train can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2020. The linked authority identifier is Q5598648. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2006, 1982 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great American Train Show” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.