In 2010, NALUG's display at GETS again won the people's choice award. Attendance at this show was noticeably greater than at the past couple of years. Centered around Europe, the display featured castles, a seaport, wind turbines, Hogwarts castle, London scenes, etc., including many items new to this display.
NALUG's 2010 GETS display was sort-of centered around several European countires. Laz was show dictator for this year, and he initially suggested a display based on the Orient Express railroad. That would allow the LEGO Eiffel Tower at one end, and the LEGO Taj Mahal at the other end. In between could be European and Asian countries with castles, mountains, seaports, farms, etc.
One suggestion was to add England to the display. That lead Michel to think about a Chunnel (English CHannel tUNNEL) to connect it to the rest of the display. Andrew wanted to re-use the windmills somewhere, and suggested Denmark. Jason D and Ian wanted to bring the seaport back, bigger and better. That could have been the far east, near the Taj Mahal, but ended up being physically near Denmark.
These various suggestions eventually lead to an early diagram of the layout, seen below. This wasn't the final shape of the layout at the actual train show, but it is close enough to get a good idea. We had to turn the connection to England in a different direction, in order to fit in the space available. This picture also doesn't show the Swiss or Danish track loops, and has early ideas for the Chunnel loops and the train yard.
One of the interesting things about this train show setup is that we yet again set a new club record for the number of LEGO trains running at the same time. This layout has a long double-track mainline run on DCC, so we could fairly easily have 4 trains running there, and did so for a lot of the show. In addition, there was one train (Hogwarts Express) in London, one train running through Europe, one train looping around the mountain peak, one train in the train yard, one train in Denmark, and two "secret" trains running under the English Channel. The first of those was the Chunnel Train itself, and the second one had LEGO fish on it, waggling back and forth via Technic mechanisms as they were carried past the viewing portal on an all-black train. That comes to a total of 11 9V LEGO trains. Plus, there were 2 Thomas trains running for most of the show.
