Subject:
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recap of our "Day Out with Thomas" display
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Mon, 5 May 2003 14:22:06 GMT
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Viewed:
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1214 times
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Recap of our two weekends of "A Day Out with Thomas" at the Minnesota
Transportation Museum's Jackson Street Roundhouse. (http://www.mtmuseum.org)
Seven days, several thousand visitors, a LOT of them being kids. We had a
pretty good time! The new town layout looks good (pictures soon!), we need
to do some more finalized versions of streets, parkway and trees, because we
threw it together at the last minute. Dozens of people asking if we sold
LEGO Trains, we had to tell them we weren't allowed to sell when "Thomas"
was there. (We need to update our website with a 'for sale' section.)
Overall the layout performed wonderfully. Only two wrecks, one was our
#10020 Santa Fe Super Chief that we keep on display to show people what a
'real' LEGO train looks like. A small hand pulled it onto the mainline, and
before we knew it the mainline freight had pushed it around half the layout
before sending it off the table. Dan Siskind managed to put it together,
even without the directions. The second wreck was yesterday morning before
the paying customers even got there - I somehow managed to send Dan's
caboose model of the track, and did it ever crash spectacularly! But, I got
it back together with just one extra piece that I couldn't figure out where
it went...
We premiered some new rolling stock:
Bill Toenjes had his Dan Patch locomotive:
http://news.lugnet.com/announce/moc/?n=1061. It looked great, and ran
pretty well, but was a bit finicky at times. I'd say Bill modelled the
original quite well in that regard! <grin>
Steve Demlow had his Furka-Oberalp Swiss
(http://www.rail-info.ch/FO/index.en.html) Passenger train, pictures to come.
I am still working on my "Challenger" locomotive, I'm a few steps closer to
getting it to run reliably, but there is still much work to do on it. But
as I told people, that's the big advantage to building with LEGO: If
something doesn't work, just take it apart and try again! The original
version was designed to only handle straight and curved track, the new goal
is to have a train that can also handle switches and cross-tracks. I'm 95%
sure I can make it work, but it will require basically a complete re-build
of the running gear. That's my pet project for the next several weeks.
We had one special guest show up un-announced and un-expected, the one and
only Larry Pieniazek was there this past Friday. Good to see you again, Lar
- hope we're doing ok without your supervision. ;-)
The people at the roundhouse continue to treat us like long-lost relations.
Always stopping by the layout to see how we were doing, always joking with
us, and even letting us sneak into the volunteer breakroom for lunch each
day. To all the wonderful people at MTM: THANK YOU!
I hope to have some new pictures up this week sometime. As always, the
GMLTC is more interested in building stuff than promoting ourselves... <grin>
JohnG, GMLTC
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