What you are referring to are those one-day operations where a single-wide trailer with 16 slots is trucked for a day in to preserve the gaming entitlement on a given site. Last year there were four: at Sahara Center (a shopping mall), the old Moulin Rouge site, the Lake Mead Lounge and at the former site of The Beach, directly opposite the Las Vegas Convention Center.
State law requires that gambling be available once every two years on sites like these, to preserve the underlying, unrestricted gaming entitlement of that site. One such former "Trailer Station," Skinny Dugan’s Pub, subsequently went back into business, demonstrating the value of keeping that non-restricted status in good standing.
The one-day operations are announced on a month-to-month basis, when the agendas for Nevada Gaming Control Board and Gaming Commission meetings are disclosed. No temporary casinos are slated for April’s session and if any are contemplated for May, it will not become a matter of public record until the last minute.
Several government sources speculate that the old Castaways site will have the next eight-hour casino. Indeed, it was this empty lot which inspired Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Howard Stutz to coin the "Trailer Station" term in September 2007, when Station applied for permission to hold eight-hour gambling at the site. The land is owned by NP Centerline Holdings, an affiliate of Station Casinos – hence the nickname. However, Station did not have United Coin – the slot-route operator who handles virtually all of these exercises – set up shop on the site until January 2008 (an exercise repeated, to our knowledge, in 2010, and presumably once more in 2012, since the GCB cites the license as being in good stead, although we confess that "Trailer Station" passed us by). So, even if Castaways shows up again on the Control Board docket this year, we might not see another "Trailer Station" until sometime early 2014.
