WAMALUG: Meeting: January 8, 2000

The Atrium
1530 North Key Boulevard
Arlington, Virginia

Chris made the original announcement of the meeting on rec.toys.lego

The layout.
A view down Main Street.
Action in the yard.

After a bit of a late start, we set up the tables to match our show layout and started setting up our buildings and roads. A great turnout, but no new members made it this time, even if we did generate several walk-in spectators.

Main Street, our keystone, really got fleshed out this time, with a bank, a town hall, an art-deco theater, office buildings, a post office, and street fixtures. Only about two baseplates of Main Street remained open, and Chris joined some others to get those populated with new buildings.

The yard was also a highlight with Chris adding nice new models like the sanding tower and signal tower.

Eric brought a huge box of LEGO® he had won at an auction and spread it out on the floor for sorting and for trade. At one point or another, everyone got in on the fun: examining the new pieces, bargaining for parts, or just helping sort the thousands of pieces into bins. There were some great finds in the bin including lots of trans-orange for Chris, Denise found a rare saucer part to make her Exploriens complete, and Stephen got a number of gates and fences to help flesh out suburbia.

The huge sorting pile.
Bob’s cool spaceship!
Jeff messes with the tower.

Kevin spent most of the afternoon building a huge “under construction” skyscraper and lift crane for Main Street. With partially built walls and support beams, the skyscraper really looked like a work-in-progress and really made Main Street look like a living thing. After the skyscraper, Kevin and Timmy started working on a generic building. As the building grew, it became an apartment building, then a roof of yellow slopes gave the distinct impression of a McDonald’s! The crowning touches were Timmy making a giant M and Kevin adding distinctive white “ribbing” to the yellow slopes!!

While Kevin was working on his buildings, Cletus wanted to see how long a train could be with only two engines. With only a few mishaps, he reached over 70 cars, depleting all the available cars we had at the meeting! At one point the train was so long the engine could not get started without running into its own caboose on the loop so we expanded the layout by adding more table and track to the display.

The train just keeps going and going…
Bridge under construction.
Main Street shapes up.
The edge of town. Note the unused and/or abandoned track!

The yellow arched bridge from our last meeting (December 4th) was slated to be modified into a road bridge to connect mainstreet with “the other suburbia” in the upper left corner of the display. Unfortunately, Kevin decided that yellow beams were the best to use as supports in his “under construction” skyscraper. Lacking a nice bridge, Chris, Martha, Dan, Stephen and Timmy (mostly Chris and Dan) used Denise’s bricks to construct a great looking road bridge (using up most of Denise’s red bricks in the process!). With sturdy, block-like structure, the red-bridge really made a great match to the train bridge! Details like overhead lights and a pedestrian walkway only added to the effect! The bridge is huge, heavy, and sturdy! It will be a challenge to get to shows!

The last thing we did before breaking down for the night was talk about club business and upcoming shows and things to do. Martha read the club charter to everyone and we all agreed it was a good thing (with a few minor wording fixes), so the charter was “passed” and everyone who made it to the meeting was dubbed Charter Members of WAMALUG !!

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

Attending

…Some of the highlights of the day:

Links to photographs

Follow link to photographs taken later in the month. Photographs from Dan Boger on the twenty-eighth on Brickshelf