MAIN ENTRANCE TICKET BOOTH
Well its about time that the track had a ticket booth! I’ve been waiting a long time for delivery of a custom made piece that I ordered from a vendor in Canada, but when it finally arrived I wasn’t happy with it. Not that there was anything really wrong with it, but because of scale…as is so often the case. It was true 1:87 HO, and since it came “pre-populated” with peeps-very small, HO scale peeps-it just didn’t look right, especially for something so prominent and front-and-center as a ticket booth/entrance gate. I needed something a little bigger, so I went and did what I often do (and, in this case, should have done in the beginning): improvised and made my own!
What you see here is a kit from Walther’s which was sold as an ice cream stand, but we already have not one but two ice cream trucks in the infield, so this was repurposed as a ticket booth due to its great pass-through windows on both sides. And yes, this is also HO scale, but a ticket booth is supposed to be small! Reminds me of those little Kodak “Fotomat” booths (millennial kids won’t remember those).
As close-quartered as it is, there’s 2 guys in the booth (hope they used Dial!) to handle all the sales of the crowd lining up to get in, a line getting longer by the second as people keep coming in from the now almost-full parking lot! Listen at those ca$h regi$ter$ sing: Cha-CHING! Once you’ve bought your ticket to ride, its through the gates and up into the Dunlop bridge, over and down to the main infield!
Just outside the entrance gates sit a couple of exceptionally wild dragsters, in display for the crowd to admire; a Dodge funny car in hot pink, it’s fiberglass body flipped up and propped open for the world to see, and an insane custom made “Road Dragster” featuring a pair of big-block V8’s mounted side by side, sharing a common blower and twisting a common driveshaft. A rope barrier makes overtures toward keeping the crowd from getting too close, but at least one guy-a mechanic, to look at his coveralls-was determined to see exactly what made that race Hemi tick.
To complete the picture, we have a chain link fence to corral the crowd in the right direction and prevent people from just jumping the track and sneaking in-as, undoubtedly, some “bullet-proof” young’uns would have no hesitation about running across 4 lanes of asphalt being traveled by 3500 pound gas-powered missles traveling at 150-200 MPH! And don’t look too close, because if you do you’ll notice that the chain link fence is only on one side…well, I haven’t gotten around to ordering the fencing for the other side yet! I’m workin’ on it!
