It has been rumored for a while but it looks like it is a reality now. Some images have popped up on a Czech LEGO web site of the new flex track. LEGO set 8867 includes 64 flexible elements. Looks interesting. I may have to invest in some Power Function elements! With this new track and the 10194 Emerald Night steam engine, 2009 is looking like a pretty good year for train fans.
Yesterday a profile of Joe Meno ran in the News and Observer in which I was quoted. The N&O reporter had called me Friday morning to ask some question about Joe and the LEGO hobby. I ended up talking to him for almost half an hour.
It is a nice article which really focuses on Brick Journal for the most part. There is also some discussion of the hobby and the LEGO Store coming to Crabtree Valley Mall later this year.
February 20, 2009 – 11:05 am
Last week pictures were circulating of a new LEGO train set – a steam locomotive. Lots of banter about whether it was real or fake, whether the wheels were new or from Big Ben Bricks.
The official word came out via a LUGNET post from Tony Sava. The set is very much real and will be available shortly. It will be shown for the first time at BrickFest PDX in late March.
I’ll certainly pick one of these up, it is too cool not to! Plus, I can’t build a steam train (and I have tried a couple times) to save my life! The item is already listed on LEGO S@H with a April 15th availability date. You can add it to your wish list but can’t add it to your cart.
February 5, 2009 – 3:51 pm
Uh-oh. Looks like a LEGO Store will be coming to Crabtree Valley Mall in May. Wow – I never thought I’d see a LEGO store in this area, it seems like such a small market compared to the other locations where LEGO has stores (Northern Virginia, Northern California, North Jersey, Chicago, LA, London, Munich, etc.).
Joe Meno posted a note to the NCLUG mailing list with an article from the News & Observer. Pretty cool – I hope NCLUG can work out a rotating display opportunity like WamaLUG has at the Tyson’s store.
February 2, 2009 – 12:02 pm
I got to Morehead just before the doors opened on Sunday afternoon to find a long line of people waiting to get in. The word was out! The crowd was heavy all day long until an announcement was made that the Chapel Hill Police were towing cars on Franklin Street! From that point on the crowd was still large but wasn’t overwhelming. At one point on Sunday it was so crowded we literally had gridlock.
We had a couple incidents on the train layout – people feel the need to reach in a touch something or more often, point to something and don’t realize their arm is in the way of an oncoming train. My monorail was knocked off the track a couple times but fortunately didn’t sustain any damage.
Tom Hohman’s train was knocked off the track twice but both times I was able to get the train cars put back together without any problems. The only real casualty was Tom’s freight loading crane which a child felt compelled to touch for some reason and knocked it completely over. The look on his face was terror and his mother was mortified. By the time I got to the other side of the layout they were gone. I wasn’t going to say anything to them but it would have been nice if they stuck around and at least apologized. I couldn’t fix the crane so it spent the remainder of the show in a pile.
Breakdown was slow – it took me 2+ hours to get everything taken down,boxed up, and packed in the truck. I was really happy with my packing job until i realized I had never packed the box of train track (which is a plastic wrapping paper storage container). It should be on the bottom of the pile but nope – had to stick it in the backseat with the kids!
I should have taken my big camera, my little Nikon is fine for close up but it doesn’t take very good pictures at a distance. I have a bunch of pictures but a lot of them are a little fuzzy.
More pictures are on Flickr.
February 1, 2009 – 7:40 am
My scheduled worked out and I was able to be at Morehead when the doors opened yesterday and the flood of people was overwhelming. It was packed – so packed it was difficult to move around.
The train layout looks great, we had a bit of trouble getting the outer loop to run (it is really long) but everything worked for the most part. The room is very crowded so there isn’t a lot of buffer space between the crowd and the layout which means lots of hands in it. For some reason people feel the need to touch something (it is LEGO) but are then surprised when a train derails! Oh well, it is part of the fun of exhibiting.
I’ll post some pictures later today. The event has outgrown the space at Morehead. If it happens next year (there seems to be some contention about this with the Planetarium, I am not sure why), we’ll either need the whole room (there is a section blocked off for some reason) or need to limit exhibits. As it is now, it is hard to move around the room, particularly around the west end of the train layout.
Hopefully today I will have a chance to look at the other exhibits – I didn’t even try yesterday with the crowd.
February 1, 2009 – 7:37 am
Other than running a little late, my setup for LEGOPalooza was fairly uneventful. Big thanks to Will Stroh and Dan Larson for their assistance setting up the train layout. They laid out almost all of the track and baseplates for me which is a huge help.
I had spent a couple days really limiting what I was going to bring and packing it into containers that travel well. I had to fix my church since one of my children decided to paint one of the windows at some point. Ahhg. White paint across a bunch of clear tiles doesn’t look very good. I had to take half the roof off to get the window out. PITA.
The only last minute thing I had to do was to fix the motor for the Ferris Wheel which had imploded on itself at one show and I couldn’t get it back together. Getting it to work again took a little longer than I expected and as a result I was about 45 minutes getting late to Chapel Hill.
Most of the layout was in place before I had to head back home and pick up of my kids who wanted to help so I wasn’t too worried. When we got back, we put out the people, cars, signs, etc. All told, setup took about 4-5 hours. I also added an unplanned monorail loop around part of my town which looks nice. I’d like it to be a bit longer but I am out of bricks to make supports so I’ll have to get some more of those at some point. I don’t have many straights so I am using Joe Cool’s which he bought from Cary Clark.
I have some pictures which I will post later.
More set up pictures are on Flickr.
January 27, 2009 – 6:10 pm
My area of the layout got tweaked a bit today as we finalize the layout plan. In general the layout is a bit cleaner and it is by far the largest layout NCLTC has ever done. I have a few things to figure out but for the most part, I think I am in pretty good shape. My area looks like this:
January 25, 2009 – 3:10 pm
Renee and I just finished the last module I need for my neighborhood portion of the NCLTC layout at LEGOPalooza next weekend (yikes!).
This is a middle module and features a bunch of the dark red elements I got from the UTB project. Unfortunately I ran out of the dark red headlight bricks – I wanted to make it another level taller. I still may do so if I can find some on short notice.
January 25, 2009 – 2:57 pm
This weekend, with Renee’s help, I completed another module for the neighborhood. It is a dark blue house built using mostly bricks I received from working on the UTB project. I really wanted to add some medium blue striping to it but I don’t have any and Maersk blue doesn’t look right, it has too much green in it. So I left it without any striping. I like the grey roof, it goes well with the dark blue.
This is another corner module, you can see another new middle module in the background as well as part of the corner park as well.
It has been rumored for a while but it looks like it is a reality now. Some images have popped up on a Czech LEGO web site of the new flex track. LEGO set 8867 includes 64 flexible elements. Looks interesting. I may have to invest in some Power Function elements! With this new track and the 10194 Emerald Night steam engine, 2009 is looking like a pretty good year for train fans.
