WAMALUG: Meeting: December 4, 1999

The Atrium
1530 North Key Boulevard
Arlington, Virginia

Jeff made the original meeting announcement on lugnet.org.us:

Hello Everyone! This is the Official WAMALUG Announcement for the December Meeting. It will be Located in Rosslyn VA, and take place on Saturday, December 4, at 10:00 am. The meeting will last until we get too tired to continue, or when our families call the police to report us missing. ;)

We Hope to see you there!

Announcements were made to rec.toys.lego on November 27th and December 1st as well. Stephen began his reaction to the meeting in the 1106th message to the mailing list this way:

...So what can I say? The meeting went _GREAT_!!! For all you poor souls who were not able to make it, u missed the best meeting ever!

Highlights:

Four trains running at the same time.
Four simultaneous trains on independent loops!
Buildings start to line a Main Street.
A small but growing “Main Street” , including the infamous Paradisa level crossing!
Black truss bridge and yellow arch bridge.
Two excellent bridges.
Looking down the yellow arch bridge as a locomotive starts across.
Coming down the bridge.
Display included a loop of monorail.
What layout is complete without a monorail?

A little prompting afterwards led to the recognition of additional highlights:

The description from the previous edition of the web site based on Stephen’s message has been only slightly edited.

Metroliner toy in profile. …back to the top of the page

Attending

Bob brought along his two sons who loved watching the trains run around. Rich brought his son Mike, who has now become our official “Timmy” seeing as he didn’t want to introuduce himself and no one else knew his name. :-) Timmy loved watching the trains too, but also enjoyed driving them (although he has been banned from running the Metroliner lines in the future). :-)

Tom and Stephen brought their tables and we were able to set up about a 10′×13′ table area where we at one point had five independent train loops running. At any given time, we had six to eight engines going with dozens of cars (and this time we didn’t run cross tracks so no worries about frequent wrecks! :-) It was a great thing. We also had a great time changing the layout, going thru three different iterations of table layout, track layout, and city layout.

Links to photographs

On part of the layout, one of the tables was lower to facilitate bridge building. Two wonderful span bridges were built out of Technic, including a great golden arched bridge 8 tracks long. The other bridge was a lower, black, girder-like bridge, that at one point had a long length of monorail track running over it (note for next time, remember a 9 volt battery for the monorail). :-)

Based on the tables we have, we somewhat have a layout idea if we can do a show soon. One key point is a “main street” for people to look down, and we’ve started to see a main street get fleshed out some, with a dozen buildings lining the first few plates down the run. (Hint, we need more buildings; “building specs” to be posted soon.)