Manassas Railway Festival in Manassas, Virginia on June 3, 2000

This show was under the auspices of WAMALUG before the founding of WamaLTC.

The folks at Manassas contacted us about setting up a table at the train show, so we rolled out in force for our first outdoors show. It was a beautiful day, perfect weather to be out and about. We were the big hit of the show, attracting more than our share of crowds and interested passers-by, but we’d come to expect that.

The show was also the debut of Plexiglas barriers on the tables. They worked ok, but kids still liked reaching over the barriers to grab passing trains and anything else in reach. Hopefully we will figure out a way to avoid this problem in the future!

Our downtown was an interesting mismatch of buildings this time. Christopher Tracey’s normal stock of buildings was packed, so we had to make do. Luckily, Martha Tracey’s excellent hardware and bicycle shop made it, along with a new music gazebo and the formal introduction of Richard W. Schamus’ Blue Station.

The best addition to our table was the new “other corner.” For a change, we built a rural area with farms and fields, and Chris designed a wonderful mountain with a little fishing pond.

Just off the rural area was the bridge crossing with Jennifer and Dan Boger’s black trestle bridge.

New to the yard was Chris’ improved engine shed with lots of wonderful detail inside (including a spiffy “working” arc welder). Chris also build a sister engine to his very popular GP-35.

Not to be outdone, Tom Cook built a great-looking pair of black Norfolk Southern engines (at least I think that’s what he called it :-) ). [Editor’s note: the black body and white stripe would be prototypical for the NS predecessor railroad Southern Railway.]

Cool things from the show:

• 

  Dan and Jenn’s (and others’) rural area. Especially liked the fields! Great effect!
• Chris’ hill pass.
• Kevin Loch’s 70’s construction yard and windmill.
• Martha’s great downtown (even if some of the buildings we normally have weren’t there). :-)

• 

  Rich’s soccer field (even if it was corrupted).
• Plexiglas. People really liked being able to get right up to the models (though kids did have a tendency to reach over it). :-/

• 

  Tom’s big black engines.
• Cletus Romano’s collection of trucks, which just keeps getting bigger and better (and he didn’t leave any of them this time!) :-)

Funny things that happened:

• I can’t get all the tables in my car

  Stephen F. Roberts had to drive to Reston to rescue some of the tables from Chris’ house, so we were frantically still putting together the display at 10 o’clock. :-)

• Watch the cars roll

  Our tables were on a slight slope, so the trains had a tendency to roll down the track. And we all know how poorly LEGO® trains take hills!!

• Really, I can drive these things!

  Cletus took control for a while and managed a derailment every 10 minutes or so. :-)

• I can do better than that

  Kevin took over and had a Metroliner tip over on a curve right when the outer cargo train was passing, resulting in a spectacular 12+ car pileup.

• I brought some sunscreen

  Martha brought sunscreen but too many of us weren’t bright enough to use it. :-)

Brickshelf gallery of Abe Friedman.