2023 marks the five-year anniversary of the LLMTC. We decided to celebrate this anniversary by organizing a huge event for all of our members and all the friends we made in those five years. This article will give you a in depth look at the event, and how the LLMTC came together.
What’s the LLMTC?
The Lowlands L-Gauge Model Train Club is a small group of LEGO train enthusiasts, dedicated to modelling railways in 1:45 scale, or as close to it as (in)humanly possible. While trains are our main focus and what binds us together, several members also build diorama’s, cars, and other landscape elements to the same scale as our trains. We usually aim for 1:45, although the restrictions of the bricks sometimes result in variations between 1:48 and 1:43. Effectively the trains tend to be 8 studs wide.
The founding members of the LLMTC first met at LEGO World 2017, and decided to form a building group the next year, with the goal to build both trains and layouts that would be able to connect to each other at events. LEGO World 2018 was their first show together as a group. Standards and rules where established early on, similar to what you see in “traditional” model railway clubs. But LLMTC was entirely dedicated to building in L-gauge and scale 1:45. We’ve always considered ourselves a model railway club, which happened to be building in L-gauge, rather than a LEGO user group who build trains. After LegoWorld 2018, many other events followed. like LegoWorld 2019, NLGM Wörrstadt and Schkeuditz. Along the way, other builders joined the group, and the group became closely in contact and involved with many other LUG’s, projects like open L-gauge and events like the BrickTrainAwards.
The idea of LLMTCworld
The idea of organizing our own club event resonated from back in the long and dark covid days, when a lot of events where cancelled and you couldn’t host a large audience of visitors. Initially, we held a small gathering back in 2020, which was members only. This grew into the 2021 and 2022 ArnhemWorld event, where we would invite a small group of befriended builders like the Noppenbahner.
For this year, we decided to go big and make it possible for everyone who builds trains in 1:45 scale to join in, and therefore get one of the large gatherings of L-gauge builders in the Netherlands. This show would result in a lot of friends, which made in those five years, to travel all the way to meet up with us again. And for some, it was the first time to meet up with us in real life after working together through the internet for many years.
Looking for a venue
One of the biggest challenges we had for organizing LLMTC-world was the venue. In previous years we would organize our ArnhemWorld event at a high school in Arnhem. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible during the planned weekend for LLMTCworld. And thus, the rebranding from ArnhemWorld to LLMTCworld.
After a long search for possible event locations, we were able to find a hall in a bus depot that wouldn’t be in use for the weekend we where planning to host LLMTCworld. This did provide some challenges, biggest of them all, there weren’t any tables available to use at the venue. We had estimated we needed around 65 tables for all the layouts and the staging yards.
This estimation was followed by a few weeks long calling and emailing renting company’s, looking for the best and cheapest possibility. Tip for others who are considering organizing l-gauge related events, tables are expensive! A venue with tables makes organizing an event so much easier. We spent a lot more time and, quite frankly, a lot more money than we anticipated for getting all the tables we needed.
After this was taken care off, there were still a lot of smaller tasks on our to-do-list. Organizing stuff like diner, layout planning and general stuff takes a lot of time, and we would advise anybody who plans on hosting an event to keep this in mind.
Layout planning.
Tamás & Erwin where in charge of layout planning, and Tamás had spent a lot of time before the event puzzling all of the modules together in BlueBrick. But, as will be familiar to anyone who has planned an event of their own, there will always be things you didn’t consider beforehand. In our case, we found out there was collum for a car lift right where we were planning to build our branch line. But after some re-configuring of the track plan by Erwin & Tamás, we made it work. The layout we ended up with on the day was probably even better than the one we had planned initially.
Merch
What is an event without some cool merchandise? This year Erwin and Raised decided to design a unique T-shirt and logo for the event. This years’ design was a festival shirt with our main logo featuring the one and only Carlos! The front of the Shirts showed Carlos in the special LLMTCworld logo, the back named all the builders who took part in the event.
Setting-up
On Friday we gather early at the venue to start cleaning up the place and unload all the tables we rented. We used multiple camper vans from different LLMTC members to drive back and forth between two different rental companies, different hardware stores, and the venue. Ties, our chief Bob the Builder, spent a lot of time making filler sections between tables, so that layouts wouldn’t need to be place above gaps in between the tables. That’s one of the downsides of building all your layouts off grid and in strange angles.
And Ties got another special task on Friday. It turned out that Erwin’s banana yard was right below a small leak in the roof. So, Ties has to be creative on fixing that one. Luckily, we found a scissor lift in the parking lot, and the leak was fixed before any trains had to swim their way across Erwin’s yard.
At the end of the day most of the layouts were set-up and we were able to start unpacking our trains and fill up the yard.
Saturday
On Saturday we started early again, finishing the last small gaps in the layout. Builders who weren’t able to get there on Friday arrived early on Saturday morning, to set-up their layouts and to unpack their trains. By around 11:00 the entire yard was packed full, and the layout was completely set-up. Now it was finally time to start driving some trains!
We only have one rule when it comes to driving trains, and that you always drive on the right-hand side of the track. Some builders who weren’t used to that had some difficulty with that, resulting in weird situations where you would be driving towards each other on the same track. Beside that, your able to drive whenever you like, taking whatever wagons and route that you would like. Especially when it comes to freight wagons, a lot of the wagons get mixed up when driving. Most of the time you would be pulling or shunting freight wagons from 3 or 4 different builders at the same time. And that’s what makes driving at events like these so much fun.
I personally love shunting in one of the different stations or the big yard, reorganizing the freight wagons and making giant mixed freight trains that others would be able to pick up with their locomotives.
Evening
Traditionally on Saturday evening, we host special activities. One of these is the traditional A(k)awards ceremony, where the host (Raised), would hand out professionally made award bricks. There was also a quiz with in depth questions, like who has the longest running unfinished project.
To celebrate the first release of the collaboration premium building kits from HA bricks, Raised and Erwin gave a presentation of how they designed the model, and how the experience was to work together with HA bricks to turn the model into a premium building kit.
Sunday
Sunday was the second day of driving trains on the layout. It was quiet in the morning since most the drivers where still hungover from the Saturday evening. But after lunch, most people where awake and present again, and everybody was able to fully enjoy driving their trains on the railway lines. To get a better understanding on what it’s like to operate your trains on this event, let’s step into my SSN 01 1075 with Rheingold coaches (don’t mind the door that keeps falling off, or that buffer, they weren’t important) and let’s drive across the railway line! If you’re wondering how this train looks like when it’s driving on the layout, take a look at this video which shows the combination in action at LLMTC-world:
We start off at the main staging yard. This location is always packed with trains who are ready to go, or are getting some small repairs. This time Erwin is getting another huge container train ready to go on the mainline, so in between his shunting actions we kindly ask if we are allowed to leave, and the switches are kindly set in the correct position. We depart the yard and pass Essendorf station from Thomas Reincke. Since we know Erwin will be leaving the yard soon, we better step up the pace and continue onwards. Passing Raised his polder landscape and Tijn his farm we come across halte Wattenweiler from Thomas Reincke. Since the railway line in this station is in a bend, we are really able to pick up speed.
After we pass some curved NOIS modules Nicolas made, we come by the railway crossing from Daniel and the farm module from Jelle. After these, we come to a slow and gentle stop at Krokant Centraal, the new station that I’m constructing. Since the magnets from Erwin his freight train decided not to work today and leave Erwin looking for lithium magnets, we’ve got some time to stop here and take pictures. After a departure we come through the Banana yard from Erwin, a landscape module by Ties and the layout Tamás built, which uses grand curves to give a nice smooth feel to it. This layout is also the junction for the first section of the branch line (more about that later). After Tamás his layout we enter the Darwin interchange by Erwin, this layout is full of switches and weird crossing and has a triple function. It functions as a return loop for the main line, as a second junction to the branch line, and as the perfect location for spectacular accidents as different train lines cross over each other.
The first junction into the branch line leads into Donát’s station. This has sidetracks for multiple trains to wait before they enter the mainline. The second junction into the branch line has multiple small modules connected to each other. First is a small module I’ve built together with Tamás about a year ago, second is Daniel’s module with a railway maintenance shed and lastly comes Gruninger’s layout where steam locomotives can get fresh coal and water.
After this, both branch line routes join together, and continue up to Wörrstadt Hbf built by Nick Kleinfelder. This station is, like mentioned before, the perfect place for some shunting activities, but is also a great place to take pictures off trains against the perfect backdrop of the classical and historical station building.
Last but not least, this branch line ends up in the tunnel module Erwin is working on. After this tunnel comes the smaller branch line yard which was mostly used to house freight wagons during the shunting activities at Wörrstadt Hbf.
Line-ups
On Sunday afternoon we decided to celebrate the five-year anniversary of the LLMTC with some line-ups that would show what a diverse range of trains we have been building in the last five years. First was the special LLMTC line up, with some of the most recognizable models built by LLMTC members in the last 5 years.
After that, we wanted to showcase some diversity, and highlight all of the unique colors and shapes we are able to incorporate into the models. So we gathered all the black and red tea kettles together in Wörrstadt Hbf. Can you spot the differences?
Lastly, we gathered all the nez-cassé locomotives that were present at this show, a whopping 15 in total, at the banana yard. Since the entire railway was blocked for these line-ups, others had the opportunity (or where forced to) to stop and take some pictures of their own models at different locations around the layout.
Video
Like always Ties recoded a lot of the trains running on the huge layout and combined this to a amazing video. Nothing shows events better than the talented video’s Ties makes. I highly recommend watching this video!
Looking back
Looking back at the weekend and the months before the event, there were a lot of stressful moments trying to get everything to come together, but it was worth it. Organizing this event took more time than we first anticipated. Both Raised and I spent a lot of evenings calling each other to discuss stuff we had arranged or still needed to arrange. Tamás had the difficult task to plan all the layouts together and spent a lot of time fighting with our beloved BlueBrick program.
However, seeing all these people come together during the weekend and seeing all those trains run on the layout that we spent so much time on, was more than worth it! This even was easily in the top 3 events I’ve ever been too, and was a perfect way to celebrate five years of LLMTC. Let’s hope we can celebrate the 10th anniversary of the LLMTC in an even bigger way!
I hope that every builder who came by or attended the event had as much fun as I did. To see so many friends come together is truly breathtaking. This all started 5 years ago when a small group of similarly-minded train builders came together just do one show. Now, five years later, we’ve done more shows than I can remember, we’ve traveled to other countries just to attend LEGO train events and we’ve been involved in some amazing projects.
Thank you to all that have joined us, worked with us, and befriended us! The fact that we’ve been doing this for five years now is something I could never have imagined. And the fact that we’ve been able to meet and work with so many different builders and friends, is truly a privilege.
I would also like to thank HA bricks for sponsoring this event! It was great to be able to talk to Hein from HA bricks about the latest projects he has been working on. And we are really looking forward to his next products releases!
And I would like to leave with a small story when we attended a “normal” railway show earlier this year. We were talking with some members of a “normal” model railway organization and they asked us where our club house is, we responded that we don’t have one and that we all just built individual modules and models that we bring to events. This already baffled them and we spent a long time explaining what our modular standards where. I proceeded to tell them about our collaboration with other organizations like the Noppenbahner, BrickModelRailroader, BrickTrainAwards, the LNUR, Len Eisenbahner and our work with companies like TrixBrix, HA bricks, PfxBricks, Buwizz and many others. And they just couldn’t fathom it. International collaboration on this scale just doesn’t happen, not in their world at least. What we have in the L-Gauge community is very special, and we are supper grateful to have been a part of that for the last 5 year.
Thank you all for reading, take care and see you next time!
Special thanks to Ties for spell checking the entire article!
-ciao Enrico