How to Build a Lego Monorail (Without Monorail Tracks)

[gotoAndLego]

Yep, nothing feels forced. I'm sure you could do a tighter radius if you used this instead of regular 1x2 bricks on the inside of the curve.

[Brick City]

Yep, nothing feels forced. I'm sure you could do a tighter radius if you used this instead of regular 1x2 bricks on the inside of the curve.

What about using 1x1 round bricks in place of the 1x1 bricks? That might allow for an even tighter radius. I don't know if the monorail body could handle the curve, but it's worth a shot.

Edited April 5, 2016 by Brick City

[gotoAndLego]

The 1x1 bricks are on the outside of the curve so that wouldn't affect anything, but I'm sure there are ways to tighten it up. Round 2x2s instead of square 2x2s would help.

Bear in mind that the cars are longer so you can't think of it like the train bogies.

Edited April 5, 2016 by gotoAndLego

[Brickthus]

Not to resurrect an old thread, but how large is a 90deg curve? Does anyone have brick count for that curve? How many baseplates does it span?

The tightest curve is comfortable with centres at exactly 2x 48x48 plates, 96M diameter:

One eighth of the tightest curve uses 19 2x2 tiles in a track piece.

The next curve radii at 10M centres use 23, 27 and 31 2x2 tiles respectively.

The curve uses these parts:

19 2x2 tile

36 2x2 plates

70 1x2 plates

4 1x1 plates

2 brick 1x2 w 2 holes

2 black pegs to connect to the next track piece

Construction tips here and here.

Add 4 2x2 tiles, 8 2x2 plates and 16 1x2 plates for the next size up, and so on.

a half circle (4 pieces) should take about 20 minutes to make.

A little over 3 years ago I took up Masao Hidaka's concept and added some engineering to recreate all the functions of the 1990s monorail in this system, including straights, curves, points, start/stop rail and hills. The purpose of this was to help with his LEGO Ideas project because that would need a kit with tracks fitting on a grid, like the original system.

I also pushed out the limits:

- Multiple curve radii; 4 tested, more and free-form possible.

- Longer straights to span gaps, up to 64M tested.

- Variable hills, 5-bricks-high and 10-bricks-high tested, easy to extend in multiples of 5-bricks-high.

- Points are more reliable and also easy to fix.

- 8-point junction possible with a single PF servo motor. Can make any subset of the 8-point pattern, such as reverse siding (3 points) or station throat.

- Right-angle crossing possible - see pic above.

- Faster trains. With PF M-motors in 6x14 chassises they are a bit faster than the original monorail but with PF train motors and smaller bogies 0.95m/s is possible, almost as fast as LEGO trains.

- Helical tracks tested - ideal for world-record track length attempts, to beat the 562m of the original monorail. Double track helix improves density of tracks further.

- Hidaka-san has also done a traverser and used an RCX to do train detection for automatic routing.

The 2-PF-train-motor train did 3028m at full speed on a single LiPo charge, changing direction every 10 laps of this circuit. The first ten laps took a mean time of 11s per lap, the last 22s before the battery ran out.

Further to the pictures of trains, I have found it best to have the motors at the front and rear of the train rather than in the middle. It doesn't like pushing an unpowered bogie.

I'm doing a Space theme with trains of different Space factions. Hidaka-san bases his models on the Osaka monorail.

The only limit on hills is the fact that it's a ride-on-top system, without a rack. This means the hills have to be a bit longer for the same height. a 5-brick hill is 48M long and a 10-brick hill is 80M long. Add 32M for every 5 bricks high (maybe an odd 1M or 2M to make up the diagonal to a multiple of 16M in some sizes). The original monorail did a 10-brick hill in 64M long so there is a 16M length overhead for each hill of at least 10-bricks high but the overhead does not increase.

The best thing about this system is no track obsolescence as it is made of basic pieces.

Picture folder here.

Mark