LEGO Trains Day at BrickKing

Enrico Lussi has officially joined Brick Model Railroader as a contributor. We’re happy to have him on our team!

Saturday, June 29th was the third annual Lego Trains Day at BrickKing. This year UrbanErwin, raised, and Bananenbuurman showed up to help me transform a Lego Shop into a train exhibit.

Short History

BrickKing is a small Lego store in my home town of Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel in the Netherlands. I have become great friends with the owners over time, and I have worked for a couple of years in the store. In early 2017 the owners were looking for a first Lego show to organize. They did a small poll on Facebook and the result was: Trains Day. They knew I was a HUGE train fan so they asked me help to organize the event. The rest is history, it has become an annual event with a lot of local media coverage. Every year I try to invite different people and bring different types of trains or train-related items.

The Program of this Year

We have accomplished this not only by bringing new trains to this event but also by inviting different people. This year UrbanErwin, raised, and Bananenbuurman were the lucky ones.

We divided the exhibit into two sections. The first section was in the store itself. Bananenbuurman set up a small layout with a couples of TV screens showing his amazing video’s! Bananenbuurman is also the Dutch reseller of TrixBrix. So, the layout had a lot of TrixBrix products. Children (and adults too!) where able to try out the TrixBrix products and if they liked it there were able to purchase every TrixBrix product that they liked.

The layout Bananenbuurman made with a lot of TrixBrix products!

The second section was in the “party room” which normally is used for children’s birthday parties. We used this room for a small layout which showed our trains in action. Beside the layout was a small display module UrbanErwin brought, on this module we created a few amazing line-ups, but more about that later on.

Beside the layout we also had a small “workshop” in the second section. This “workshop” showed the design progress of our MOC’s. We had a laptop which showed multiple LDD designs of our MOC’s. Beside that we had a couple of scaled blueprints of train which we recreated into Lego. The reaction to this workshop was positive by visitors, especially because this workshop wasn’t meant to show off what we can build but inspire to find your own building style in the Lego train hobby.

The “workshop” table with a couple of my MOC’s. From left to right: ICM 4001 “Koploper” NS2454, NS 2459, NS 2412.

Line-Ups

As mentioned earlier, UrbanErwin brought a small display module that we used to make some line-ups of our rolling stock. This is something we have done in the past on other events, but this time was special because we all had a lot of new MOCs. For most of these MOCs, it was the first time the public was able to see them, such as raised and his TRAXX locomotive, for example.

The yellow line-up featured from left to right: NS 1600 by raised, NS 2454 by me, Mat 64 by UrbanErwin, ICM 4001 “Koploper” by me, and NS 1200 by UrbanErwin. It was the first time all these MOC’s where together, and they are going to see each other a lot for coming years!

The red line up, all these where from raised, I have a red V100 in storage somewhere, but I forgot to bring it to the event. From Left to right: the red version of the NS 1600, TRAXX and 6400.

The beauty of a small, one-day event

I could imagine that a couple of you readers out there are wondering: “What’s the point of a one-day event?” There is no point in setting up a huge layout for just one day, so you can only place small items. Since there isn’t a lot of room, you can’t display a lot of trains either.

And I go to say, those are fair points but, the best thing about a small one-day event like this is that it transforms from an event to spending a day playing with trains and seeing friends that you haven’t seen for a while. Like so many others I haven’t got a lot of weekends off to go to a Lego show, a one-day event means that I still have a day playing with trains, but without my entire weekend being fully booked.

Besides that, we all live quite far away from each other (from a European standpoint, that is). So, for most of the year, we don’t see each other. The last time I have seen raised was at least 4 months ago, and since then he has built a lot of amazing MOCs which I had not yet seen in real life yet.

It was a wonderful day with a lot of trains. Despite the warm weather there were a lot of visitors and the reactions from them, especially the children, were great to hear! And the best of it, next year there will be another Train Day, with a lot of new and different trains!

This picture was taken seconds before the event started, just a couple of minutes later the entire store was full of visitors.

I would really like the owners of BrickKing for letting us transform there store again! It was a wonderful day and I can’t wait for next weekend. And of course, I would like to thank UrbanErwin, raised and Bananenbuurman for participating in this event.

UrbanErwin: https://www.flickr.com/photos/epjl

raised: https://www.flickr.com/photos/raised/

Bananenbuurman: https://www.youtube.com/user/bananenbuurman