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On March 22-23, RichLUG participated in the annual Wings ‘n’ Rails Show at
the Aviation Museum of Virginia (http://vam.smv.org) here in Richmond, VA.
Here’s a link to a folder in our BrickShelf gallery that contains some
pictures I took with an elderly 35 mm camera and had developed to a CD:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=38991
Here are some details:
This is the smaller of the two shows that the Science Museum of VA
(www.smv.org) hosts each year. The “big” show is takes place in September
and is held at the main museum in the city. This smaller, spring show takes
place at the smaller aviation museum that is located at Richmond
International (RIC) Airport (about 6 miles east of downtown).
In addition to our club’s set-up, there were about 7-8 other model train
layouts and a few vendors. Over the course of the two days there were
probably about 1,000 visitors to the museum. Attendance was perhaps a
little lower than it would have been due to the fact that the weather turned
really nice on the weekend after several consecutive days of rain. Even so,
for the Aviation Museum it was a boom since they’re probably used to getting
50 people on a good day.
We had considered skipping the show this year but the invitation from the
organizers included the news that they had decided to give us the space on
the observation deck of the museum. The museum is a huge
hangar-of-a-building and in the center of this big open space is a small
little block structure that houses a theatre. On top of the structure is an
observation deck that allows folks to get a different perspective on the
planes that are in the museum as well as get a little closer to the ones
that are suspended from the ceiling. The idea of setting up our display up
above everything else was too appealing to pass up.
The whole space is about 15’x 30’. We ended up setting up an I-shaped
display that was about 10’x 18’. One end was devoted to downtown Brickmond
and the other to Brickenbloom House & Gardens and a commercial area
consisting of a motorcycle repair shop, a pizzeria and the Brickelodeon
laptop theatre.
In the center we set up a small airport. One of our members (Bert Waters)
has a fairly good collection of planes from various town sets and we’ve
never really had a chance to lay them all out before. Around and through
all of this we managed to put together four loops of track.
A BIG highlight of this show for us was being able to show off the upcoming
Wright Bros. Flyer that will be next Famous Planes release from Lego Direct.
The Aviation museum has been involved for a while in a project to recreate a
working model of one of the Wrights’ flyers. They also have a couple of
Wright gliders on display (suspended from the ceiling).
Once we decided to do the show, the idea of contacting LD and asking about
displaying the Flyer was raised. I was pretty sure that with the release
still several months off that there wouldn’t be any sets available that we
could borrow. To my surprise though, when I raised the idea with Brad he
immediately offered to ship us out the prototype for the show so that we
could display that since it really was the only actual thing they had
available for promoting the set at this time. Many thanks to Brad and Jake
(who took care of getting the plane down to us) for providing RichLUG with
this unique opportunity.
We enjoyed “showing off” all of the planes and people were very impressed
with the sets. This included quite a few of the actual aviation museum
employees and volunteers (many of whom are retired aviators) along with the
general public. Folks really liked the way the engine and propellers moved
on the Wright Brothers Flyer.
The only downside to our display of the planes was the fact that the museum
had its Flyer recreation packed up on a trailer in preparation for a
cross-country tour. We had hoped to get some pictures of it and the Lego
set together. Maybe by the time we do next year’s show it will be back home
and we’ll have our own copy of the Wright Bros. set to show off.
The other big highlight of the weekend was the Brickelodeon laptop theatre.
I put together a collection of brickmation videos that I had downloaded from
the Internet by way of the BrickFilms directory (www.brickfilms.com). There
were a total of 16 videos that were in this loop. I also played a few of my
videos though for some reason the playback of my stuff was acting goofy so I
mainly stuck to the variety collection.
People really enjoyed stopping and watching the brickmation that was being
shown at the theatre. There were plenty of kids who seemed to sit through
at least one complete loop of all the videos and because they were kids
there were several that seemed to sit through it multiple times. Some folks
came back to watch some more after wandering away for a little while.
A lot of the items in our layout are things that we’ve shown off before.
The one new creation that I had to show off was my version of the Hogwarts
Express. You can see it in some of the pictures that include Brickenbloom.
We ran it on a small loop around the house and gardens where its 8-wideness
was not a problem. I have some more pictures of this train on another roll
of film that has yet to be developed. I will post them soon though.
That’s about it for the report. Hope folks enjoy the pictures.
Greg
P.S. More pictures (from Tim Freshly) of the show are available on the
RichLUG website:
http://groups.msn.com/RichLUGWebsite/march2003trainshow.msnw?albumlist=2
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