Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
The next Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group meeting will be April 15, 2007 at Museum of American Heritage. Please come by and see what people have to display, as well as buy/sell/trade.
Don’t know yet what I’ll be displaying, but I’m hoping to build some stuff before then. I’ll probably have stuff for sale too. At the moment, however, I’m on vacation in South Carolina (if you’re in the area and want to meet, let me know!), so I won’t be posting much LEGO stuff for the next week or so at least.
I keep building stuff and using it in BayLTC displays but not posting them online!
Here’s another example. This locomotive was built a few years ago, not long after I first got the Super Chief, which sadly has long been discontinued. Like the Super Chief, the top lifts off and it has a control cab with prime mover motor modeled inside. I also added a head-end unit.
Key features I’m particularly proud of are the cockpit windows (mounted on plate hinges) and cooling fans (made from 4×4 turntables, taken apart – the base is mounted on the top of the roof, and the top of the turntable is placed underneath to represent intakes). The nose is also mounted at a difficult angle; this is achieved by a combination of hinge elements.
The color scheme is based on the Caltrain commuter trains which run between San Francisco and San Jose, CA. The exterior detailing is minimal, and not terribly accurate (for one thing, the real thing has red and white stripes on the nose, not yellow and black), but at most of our train shows people have immediately recognized it as a Caltrain so I consider it a success.
This weekend, BayLTC is exhibiting at the Train Collectors’ Association Cal-Stewart Spring Meet at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara. 
We have a 25’x25′ train layout with four loops of trains and a monorail. The exhibit is open to the public today from 10am to 2pm.
I took some pictures of the layout this morning which you can view on Flickr (or view as a slideshow)[tags]bayltc,lego,tca[/tags]
I forgot my camera, but Bruce took pictures which you can see on his Brickshelf Gallery.
We used a theme of “winter sports” for this one, based on a snowscape built by club member Anne, with some skiers and snowboarders and trees contributed by various members. Since it was fairly low to the ground, we added a couple of snowboarders hanging in mid-air above the slope (suspended on string).
The display will be up for about six weeks at the LEGO store in Valley Fair Mall, Santa Clara, CA.[tags]lego,baylug[/tags]
It would appear that LEGO is working on a massively multiplayer online game! At least, according to this blog entry from kotaku.com, LEGO is working with NetDevil to produce a new online game where kids can interact using virtual LEGO bricks. And if you don’t believe the blogs, try checking out the official press release from NetDevil or LEGO official Web sites…[tag]lego,game,netdevil[/tag]