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Posted

I am:  I have already acquired about 12 or so sections of flat, straight track as well as at least 6 of the black roller coaster car bodies for use in making a sort of dieselpunk take on the old Decauville system of prefab 2.5' gauge track used in the late 19th & early 20th century for temporary mining, logging & military railways.  I.e I use the roller coaster track to represent prefab welded steel 3' gauge track sections used for temporary tracks for minecarts, logging trains, industrial & trench railways that can be easily bolted to a solid substrate (e.g. lag bolt driven into the rock floor of a branch tunnel in a mine shaft or a concrete block sunk into the mud at the bottom of a trench near the frontlines) and just as easily unbolted & moved to a new location...

Just need to design a couple locomotives & some rolling stock based on the rollercoaster car bodies... Although I have found that trains designed to run on standard LEGO PF-type narrow gauge tracks, like what came with the Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom or Friends Roller Coaster sets will fit on the roller coaster track, although they might not be able to handle the much tighter curve radius, depending on how one has designed any bogies they use.  A good example of this is the "Rhino Showdown at the Mine" Black Panther set that has 2 straight sections of the roller coaster track, but with a minecart that uses the standard LEGO small train wheels on the 2x2 wheelplates, much like the minecarts from the Temple of Doom and the Lone Ranger Silver Mine Showdown sets.

Posted

I've already gotten my first order of track and pieces to start working on an elevated train for a theme park.  I need to put in a couple more orders for more parts before I start working on it in earnest, though.

Posted (edited)

I'm personally looking into acquiring some track to potentially use for a pseudo-monorail in a Ninjago or Space layout. Not much of a builder of "realistic" trains or layouts but I feel like the reduced scale and potential for dynamic changes in elevation offered by the roller coaster track could be fun to experiment with.

I also think the steeper 45 degree slopes from the roller coaster could be neat to use for some sort of funicular or imitation cog railway, but since they so far only come in red I'm hoping to wait it out until they appear in a more versatile color like grey.

Edited by Lyichir
Posted
1 hour ago, Lyichir said:

I also think the steeper 45 degree slopes from the roller coaster could be neat to use for some sort of funicular or imitation cog railway, but since they so far only come in red I'm hoping to wait it out until they appear in a more versatile color like grey.

I've actually considered using that steep slope for such  a project as well (but possibly with two parallel tracks, since most funiculars tend to be broad gauge), if I ever build something that could use a funicular, that is.

Posted (edited)
5 hours ago, Digger of Bricks said:

Well, check out this adorable little LEGO Ideas project by cheeseinthepie... :blush:

LEGO Ideas - Miniature Train Set

So cute and creative!!! It's neat to see a LEGO Train MOC that really tries to explore the category in a new way. It almost feels like a LEGO equivalent of the classic Brio wooden train sets, in sort of the same way that the LEGO Racers Tiny Turbos felt like a LEGO equivalent of Hot Wheels.

It occurred to me looking at this feature that this kind of smaller scale and push-powered design could really facilitate some features that are often much more complicated with full size, motorized LEGO trains, such as railway overpasses, bascule bridges, railway turntables, and engine sheds or roundhouses.

These kinds of features are common among some other brands of toy train set, but while I've seen some MOCists come up with brilliant ways of achieving them for their own layouts, they often wind up way bigger, more complicated, or more expensive than anything you'd see in a typical LEGO train set.

Even the relatively modest Train Engine Shed set from the World City theme (https://brickset.com/sets/10027-1/Train-Engine-Shed) is pretty unique among all train-related sets before or since, which tend to focus less on maintenance and more on passenger stations, cargo terminals, level crossings, signal houses, and of course the trains themselves. I suppose that in fairness, these might be more familiar sights to kids in this day and age, since I suspect that in this day and age security is pretty tight at engine sheds that are still actively used. I think some of my only real-life exposure to engine sheds and the like was seeing them as a young child in Thomas the Tank Engine books and videos, and seeing an old roundhouse that had been converted into a museum in Savannah, Georgia as an adult.

Edited by Aanchir
Posted
11 hours ago, Aanchir said:

So cute and creative!!! It's neat to see a LEGO Train MOC that really tries to explore the category in a new way. It almost feels like a LEGO equivalent of the classic Brio wooden train sets, in sort of the same way that the LEGO Racers Tiny Turbos felt like a LEGO equivalent of Hot Wheels.

Yeah, I grew up with wooden railway systems like Brio (Learning Curve's Thomas Wooden Railway system in particular), so this concept of bringing the format to the LEGO System holds a little bit of nostalgia for me. :classic:

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