Michigan LEGO® Users Group

Attendees:
David Kohrman
Chris, Sandy, Kira & Ethan Leach
Steve, Lisa, Jacob, & Lucas Ringe
Lester Witter
Guests:
Tyler Honeycut (friend of the Leach family)

Overall Picture Directories:

Steve Ringe


Report by Steve Ringe

Setup:

I arrived at Hamburg elementary school at 8:10am, Chris and Lester were already there and starting to set up tables. The plan was to use banquet tables supplied by the school. While manuevering the tables into position we noticed that we had two different table heights. Apparently they had given us the last of the tables, so we managed to swap a couple with the dealers. We ended up having two less tables than planned on. The kids train area which was going to be part of the layout, was scrapped. At this point I began to recall why we made out own tables. We had three hours setup time. We roughly laid out the track and outer baseplates, then got to placing buildings in the downtown area and freight yard. David showed up around 9:00, just in time to set his buildings in place. Ethan, Kira, and Tyler had fun placing vehicles around the layout. Sandy took on the placement of hundreds of trees and flowers. Once things were shaping up, I noticed we had bare sidewalks and lots of driverless cars (except in David's area), so I took it upon myself to populate the city. This was a first for me, and I'll have to say that it was quite fun.

Show:

People seemed to trickle into the show, no large crowds, but a steady flow of people all day. There were two layouts besides ours, one consisted of a loop of HO track on two banquet tables with one building, the other was a large O scale layout with basically just nice looking track and 3 engines running simultaneously. Needless to say, our layout was the hit of the show. This did not seem to be a heavy model railroader crowd, mostly families with kids. We got the usual barrage of questions, how many bricks, how much is this worth, how long did it take you to build, etc.

Some of the crowd favorites seemed to be:

Chris' large buildings	Chris' spinning tower crane	The ship yard
David's suicidal minifig	My Burlington Northern engines and David's DT&I caboose

Suprisingly, I had several people ask where we got the ship sets, they weren't aware that Lego sold ships. Of course I had to tell them that they were older, discontinued sets.

Our rolling stock consisted of: Metroliner with 5 club cars and 4 coaches, all provided by Chris and Sandy. Super Chief with two cars, this belonged to Chris and was the first time it ran on a layout. David's EL train. My 8-wide SD-45 with several cars. My two Burlington GP-30's with several stock lego cars, my MOC boxcar, and David's DT&I caboose.

Teardown:

My wife and kids, Lisa, Jacob, and Lucas, arrived shortly before teardown. We managed to get everything put away in a little over an hour, despite the fact that we had four little "Godzillas" wreaking havoc on the downtown area. We may have to enact a Godzilla ordinance at the next show, as this may have got a little out of hand. The vehicles were packed, David and Lester left, and my family and the Leach family spent some quality time on the awesome playground behind the school. Chris hit the swings, got horizontal, and launched himself 15 or so feet onto the playground, what a site. Who said grownups can't have fun too? It was a beautiful sunny day, and we all had a great time at the show.

- Steve

Layout Details:

Layout Pictures: