Warning: excessively long post ahead:
1) So Josh should I de-MILS my track after all? I can if we really need to, but the sooner I know the better so I can adjust my landscaping, bridge supports, etc.
2) I wouldn’t let the width of my alley influence how wide you make your roads. When we set up in Josh’s basement, he & I briefly had a discussion about ways to connect the alley to a main road, and came up with something we thought would work, I’ll post a sketch later tonight so you can see what we had in mind. That would be a longer-term plan though, after more stuff has been built and things are rearranged, cause as far as I can tell from the way things were set up at Josh’s house, my alley isn’t gonna connect to anything this time around anyway.
3) I’m still gonna show up early for setup Friday just in case. I’ll be there for teardown Sunday. I can not be there Saturday. I am not a morning person, so I signed up for Sunday afternoon. My friend Susie (who Greg, Tim, & Evan all met at Brickfair) will probably come with me, she’s been to four Brickfairs so she knows how particular Lego people are about their stuff, and she has a low tolerance for snotty little kids who have bad parents that didn’t teach them not to touch stuff that isn’t theirs, so she might help me man the display if there’s room. (She might also contribute an extra 2nd floor to my palace cineman, and actually she might be able to contribute an extra 2nd floor to Joe’s fire brigade too, if we decide we want that, I’ll ask her.)
4) I’m not sure what the final result was on having enough track. I took Tim’s advice and marked the bottoms of all my track pieces (except the 8 currently built into my display, which presumably we can remember are mine), I used the white labels I got from Josh and labelled them all with a B and a number (so I know how many of each type of piece I have) and, if that wasn’t obsessive enough, they’re also all labelled with a turquoise dot. So they’re packed up and ready to go, so I can bring them along if it’s decided we need them. I have 37 straight track, 85 curved, 5 switching, and 4 cross.
5) For those of you not familiar, the cross track is this piece:
http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?S=4519-1
(and is not the same as the RC cross track). Now that I’ve seen lots of train displays, it’s easy to see why nobody uses the cross track – the width and shape of the displays make using it not particularly practical. Also, having independent trains on independent tracks is a formula for big crashes (I’ve done it), so the only other option is a track crossing itself. However, if anybody comes up with a cool idea for using them in a future layout, I’ve got four of them.
OK, I’m done. I’ll make the next post shorter.