As some of you might know by now, I’m one of the few Contributors (the only?) of BMR that lives on the other side of the pond, ie. in Europe and more specifically in The Netherlands. Compared to the US, some things in Europe are a bit different structured when it comes to running a Lego Train Club. For one, there are no such things as LTC’s in Europe. Second, instead of organizing in regions, we tend to organize ourselves per country. This means that most of our LUGs are bigger and more diverse than in the US, with builders doing Space, Castle, City and all others in one club. Third, since train builders are a minority in most of these clubs to begin with, we tend to not do big layouts like the US-based LTC’s. Fourth, most of our exhebitions are part of bigger Lego festivals, but almost never part of a Model Railroaders event. This means that one a whole, most of the European train layouts are or one-off builds by 1 or maximum 2 builders, or are static displays on a kid-centered event that don’t really give the love that our scale-craziness “deserves”. Deserves obviously in quotation marks because indeed, we do get credits for our trains, but on a different level than US LTC’s that might show off at the NMRA for example.

Trains at Legoworld

However, that all doesn’t mean we don’t build elaborate layouts. It just means we do it a little bit less often, and when we do it, it’s mostly because of some huge show that wants to show off the best there is when it comes to AFOL building. For us in The Netherlands this typically means Legoworld, a yearly one week event that is held by TLC in Utrecht, the so-called center of our little country. Legoworld actually used to be organized by one of the local LUGs, De Bouwsteen, in Zwolle, but at one point after some intense co-operation with TLC, it was decided to hand over the organization to our favorite commercial plastic bricks producing company.

Anyway, in the last several years there always have been some kind of group train layouts, most of them organized on an ad-hoc basis (which is partly also due to the way my own LUG, Lowlug, is organized) but with some standard rules, the major being the use of MILS and the Lowlug Lego Train Standard for connecting track between modules. In the previous years this was a six-wide style layout, but for 2018 we as members of Lowlug decided there should be a layout specifically for eight-widers as well, and the rest is history.

I can now ofcourse keep on telling how this all came to fruition, but to be honest, one of your fellow members is currently writing something like that, so I’m just going to leave you with one fact: Before setting up the layout at the show, we had never tested if everything fit together. It actually did really well, proving once and for all that the internet has some great promises for us in the future.