more details about set up:
you can’t begin setting up until 5pm on Friday however you’re welcome to drop materials off inside the hall anytime after noon on Friday. Anything dropped off will need to be kept off to the side (near the “Spirit of America” layout location would be optimal) until 5pm to allow vehicles to drive in and out of the hall, but if you have sections of the layout that can be put together off to the side and then moved into position then you’ll likely have the opportunity to do that well before 5:00 on Friday.
Set-up on Friday evening goes until 7:30pm and then we reopen for setup on Saturday morning at 7:30am, so you’ll have 2-1/2 hours on Friday evening and another 2-1/2 hours on Saturday morning to work on setting up the layout.
I’m planning on being there around 2:00-3:00 pm to start “preliminary set up” (we may be able to get some tables set up off to the side, get table cloths on them, etc.) and work on getting my sections “display ready” (minifig placements, final details, reassembly/triage after shipping, etc.). From past experience, just getting tables into place and the tables covered can take upwards to an hour. Also, laying track is no picnic either.
A quick note/suggestion on train track. In RichLUG, we color coded our track, either with a color sticker or with model paint (I used a small dab of paint on the underside of each piece of my track). This made it extremely easy during tear down to simply divide the track by color. It also made everyone comfortable with sharing track where needed since such shared track would be easily identified during tear down and not be lost. For anyone bringing track, I recommend we adopt this. BTW, I claim red. Sorry if that is someone else’s favorite color but I got there first (about 10 years ago :-D).