MOCs: Models of trains running in Hungary

[Man with a hat]

Looking nice as usual. Very clean with the curves of the model.

[Capparezza]

26 minutes ago, Ashi Valkoinen said:

Yes, those gaps will be filled with cheese slopes. LDD won't allow to place them there, because as I found two cheese slopes facing each other result in 2.6 plates width (a little more than one stud which is 2.5 in plates), but this method of stressing work fine in reality. Most of the cheese slope mosaics use the same dimensions as the "smallest" unit. The upper part of missing yellow cheese slopes will be filled with 1×2×2/3 slope (double), since there is no stud next to driver's cab's window to put it on.

You are right about bogies, they are the weak point of almost all of my models, I prefer to keep them clean since these trains run many real kilometres on shows, I simply don't like when trains derail on parts they lost on previous loop. I wish I could build a framework around bogies which are strong enough to resist forces awaking when bogies enter sharp curves and points.

Ah yeah. I'm not so much into LDD, have started 2 or 3 projects but nothing overly complicated.

Well, that's a valid point for the bogies. No problem to me, as I do like those old style trains of the 9V area most and tend to keep my builds as simple as possible. Though I have other reasons to do that

[Ashi Valkoinen]

Still, your point of lacking bogie details is valid as well, I'll try to design something that fits the model and my expectations about not being so fragile. :)

Hopefully this train will be finished this year or in the first months of 2018.

[Ashi Valkoinen]

And for today I'll post about a train I posted about in 2014. Since 8W trains cost a lot (each of my trains are working), it took 3 years to collect parts and finish, today I received the last missing 60 green seat parts.

I'd like to introduce the brick-built version of Hungarian BVmot (nickname: "Samu", 434 series) train, which is a four-car electric motor unit designed for long distance (InterCity) travel in 1994. Only three of them were built due to financial reasons, however they could have been the base of Hungarian InterCity travel. Each train consists of four cars - a 2nd motor car, a 1st class middle car, a 2nd class middle car and a 2nd class driver car.

The motor car and the driver car was challenging, the angular patterns (orange-white, white-blue, blue-yellow) took lot of cheese slopes, but the designed I dreamed about in LDD worked fine in reality. I used quite lot of SNOT around doors - they are built mostly in SNOT, but the positioning and size of train door window required some SOT parts inside the SNOT design.

Closer photo of motor car:

Other challenge was offered by the middle cars - they have the same length but the 2nd class has 11, the 1st class car has 10 large windows n each side. I used regular blue train windows on 2nd class car, but a different solution was needed for 1st class car - I could not fit a simple tile between each window, because they are 9 plates high and one 1×4 tile put between with SNOT is 10 plates high... So I decided to throw train window and design something having approx. the same size. It resulted in SNOT transparent bricks and plates, with separation of 1×3 SNOT brick. The top of the windows were closed with half-plate thing brackets (9 plate height of normal windows = 1 tile, 7,5 plates height of 3 SNOT studs, 0,5 plates height of bracket.

With this technique every unique window separation could be done in LEGO. Just make sure you push everything strongly together, it is quite hard to fit!

The train is driven with two PF train motors, controlled with PF IR v2 (v1 simply won't make it move on curves). The train is able to work properly on standard track geometry (including points after points and 180 degree turnbacks), however it would look better on custom large radius curves.

In the future I plan to built indoor lights and front/tail lights as well (total of 14 PF leds will be used for this), but because of the cost of LEDs and extension cables it will take couple of months.

The LDD-design is available to be downloaded from this folder:

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=560755

Comments and critics, as always, welcome.  

[Stefaneris]

All the SNOT work is just great, good job on the nose of the train

[Asper]

The BVmot is a nice train. All of your trains look very realistic. Great collection!

[Ashi Valkoinen]

Thanks for both of you. Hopefully I can shot a video of the train going around in two weeks. :)

[Ashi Valkoinen]

Some friends of mine and me assembled a long radius curve loop last weekend. There was no exhibition, just some fun playing with our long, 8W trains, and due to the lack of the right size room and thanks to the good weather we decided to go outdoors. Here are some photos of my trains on these curves built from straight track pieces, my 8W trains really like these turns. With coaster's future 9V R120 points I can redesign my exhibition layout as well.

My latest creation MÁV BVmot train:

MÁV Siemens Taurus locomotive with some passenger cars:

ÖBB Railjet trainset:

[Ashi Valkoinen]

I took some photos during the last weeks, trying to capture my LEGO trains with their REAL sisters.

To take this photo with Ganz V63 locomotive was quite easy, the only thing I had to do is wait next to a busy line until it appears with a freight train:

Railjet train wasn't a hard task to find, but I had only one hour to go out for the photo and the first place where I planned to take the photo was unreachable, someone blocked with huge rocks the old road leading there. I had no plan "B" for this so I quickly decided to go to the nearest train stop, but railjets do not stop there and that stop was in shadows by the time I got there. And ÖBB sent this train with reversed locomotive, showing it's black end on the front and braking the nice red color pattern going through on the side of this train:

The hardest photo was my new BVmot train, there were only three sets of them produced, BVmot 001 was stored at an engine shed, BVmot 002 was stored far away from me and BVmot 003 ran on daily routine, but not with her cars. Fortunately the guys at the engine shed were kind to let me in for a photo - BVmot 001, one of her middle cars (2nd class) and her driving car (Bmxtz 001) was present, so I could take this photo:

I haven't stopped building train, I'm currently working on the Siemens Vectron locomotive of GySEV / ROeEE railway company, and the FLIRT3 train of the same company. FLIRT3 won't be the only Stadler vehicle under contruction, the 6-carriage MÁV Stadler KISS should be ready until the end of 2018!

 

[Capparezza]

Nice one, even if a bit blurry, but the idea and your determination is awesome

[zephyr1934]

Great idea to photo the models with their prototypes, and what an adventure it turned into. Excellent story.

[Ashi Valkoinen]

On 10/9/2017 at 9:18 PM, Capparezza said:

Nice one, even if a bit blurry, but the idea and your determination is awesome

Yeah, the two above photo was taken when the real thing was moving in the background (freight trains rarely stop at tracks with platforms, and even when they stop, the locomotive surely won't be next to the platform, on the other hand I was going for open lines, not train stations :) ), and by the time both the V63 and Railjet arrived it get darker and my photo machine needed more than 1/500 sec to take the photo.

Last weekend I shot couple of videos about my finished FLIRT trains - finally at last the yellow-green colored train got an SBrick, so now the three differently colored EMU can work nicely together. I tested them in different configurations by running, and I found that even a non-working motor unit can be pulled with a working one or with two working ones in "sandwich" configuration. Good to know, if the batteries die in one of them, they can still be pulled to the next station for changing the batteries inside.

 

[Beck]

Fantastic consist! Your improved cabin really makes a striking impression. How many electric motors and battery boxes does each unit have?

[Ashi Valkoinen]

1 hour ago, Beck said:

Fantastic consist! Your improved cabin really makes a striking impression. How many electric motors and battery boxes does each unit have?

Thank you. It was worth redesigning it, but truly said I'm still thinking about how it could be improved. I will never finish this project. :D

Each motor units has one big (Technic, AA) battery box (I prefer these because of the bigger capacity and the fact that they don't turn automatically OFF), an SBrick is plugged on the battery box. Three PF train motors (bogies 2,3,4) are under each train, the remaining three outputs of SBrick are reserved for front tail light ("A" and "B" end of train) and indoor lights.

[n3t3rb]

Hej Ashi

I'm excited about your trains!
On Brickshelf i found your the LDD files.
Would you be able to release the LDD version of MAV Stadler FLIRT (2014, blue/white)?
I would be donate something for your work.

Best regards

Martin

[Ashi Valkoinen]

Thanks to n3t3rb's request I put some work ours to my Stadler FLIRT design - after finishing the third motor unit with refreshing the front design and adding SBrick I didn't think that I will ever change something on them - until May of this year. The request was the SBB (Swiss Railway Company) FLIRT in LDD - and it has a long horizontal pattern on the angled part of the roof which makes my previous design to be unuseable in this case. The redesign of the angled part also made the redesign of the front necessary - at least a part of it.

So, here is the entire train in LEGO:

The difference between the new and old roof solution:

The new design of the front's top part allow to run through multiple narrow color lines (the line of cheese slopes can be a different color next to the whie on side):

Overall look:

[AE bricks]

On ‎10‎/‎9‎/‎2017 at 6:49 PM, Ashi Valkoinen said:

Railjet train wasn't a hard task to find, but I had only one hour to go out for the photo and the first place where I planned to take the photo was unreachable, someone blocked with huge rocks the old road leading there. I had no plan "B" for this so I quickly decided to go to the nearest train stop, but railjets do not stop there and that stop was in shadows by the time I got there. And ÖBB sent this train with reversed locomotive, showing it's black end on the front and braking the nice red color pattern going through on the side of this train:

Not only a stunning MOC (I like the dark red color scheme a lot) but also marvelous photography. Great job !

[Stefaneris]

Instantly recognised,

If you only knew what is sitting on my desk since more than two years

I once built this version of the FLIRT for an exhibition but never managed to motorise it. However I want to finnish my version for a comming exhibition in October.

[Carefree_Dude]

There is so many impressive things here! 

-Amazing detail and SNOT building techniques 
-You managed to find the real life trains to display your models with 
-You have a topic that has been going for almost a decade

[Ashi Valkoinen]

15 hours ago, AE bricks said:

Not only a stunning MOC (I like the dark red color scheme a lot) but also marvelous photography. Great job !

Ahhaha, thank you, I'm not totally satisfied with the photo since this photo was taken with a 12 years old Canon PowerShot, and the lights were not so good at that time because I couldn't reach the photo place where I wanted to take the photo first. And this old camera couldn't handle lower light level and 140 km/h at the same time. :)

 

14 hours ago, Goldenmasamune said:

There is so many impressive things here! 

-Amazing detail and SNOT building techniques 
-You managed to find the real life trains to display your models with 
-You have a topic that has been going for almost a decade

I found it easier to manage and show my MOC trains if I put all of them to the same topic - I have some others with trams but they are visible only to those who are browsing Eurobricks Train Tech at the time when I post the topic. And yes, almost 10 years, and almost ten years ago when Eurobricks Train Tech Contest was held. I hope I can introduce here something at the annivarsary. :)

15 hours ago, Stefaneris said:

Instantly recognised,

If you only knew what is sitting on my desk since more than two years

I once built this version of the FLIRT for an exhibition but never managed to motorise it. However I want to finnish my version for a comming exhibition in October.

In what scale are you building it and what scale did you use on the previous version? What problems did you have with motorising?

I went for SBrick and 3 Power function train motors - train motors give enough power to go through on everything (and SBrick can deliver enough current for this), I ended up with around 3700-3800 grams of each FLIRT units. :D

I remember I had seen one digial SBB FLIRT years ago here:

And I found a really nice 12V version on some german site, with the scale of official LEGO set trains, but now I can't find it anywhere.

UPDATE: found it, there she is:

http://www.l-bahn.ch/de/flirt/

[Stefaneris]

5 hours ago, Ashi Valkoinen said:

In what scale are you building it and what scale did you use on the previous version? What problems did you have with motorising?

I went for SBrick and 3 Power function train motors - train motors give enough power to go through on everything (and SBrick can deliver enough current for this), I ended up with around 3700-3800 grams of each FLIRT units. :D

 

I also build in 8w, here's a picture of it in the LDD:

http://Idea3 by StefanEris, auf Flickr

 

I hope that 2 PF motors are enough, I have another train with 2 motors and even seven cars, which is running fine. Of course only on flat layouts.

[Ashi Valkoinen]

20 hours ago, Stefaneris said:

I also build in 8w, here's a picture of it in the LDD:

http://Idea3 by StefanEris, auf Flickr

 

I hope that 2 PF motors are enough, I have another train with 2 motors and even seven cars, which is running fine. Of course only on flat layouts.

If you have a topic for this train we can continue there, but I think the following lines are ontopic here in mine as well.

So as far as I could notice your design is even longer than mine, since you have two studs between the center side windows on each car. These cars are still shorter than traditional 8W carrieges modelling a 23-26 metres long 2'2' passanger car, but these are connected with shared bogies which means total different behaviour on curves and points, especially if you put more of these next to each other. The perfomance of my trains is good with two motors on straight tracks or on one switch turnout, but it struggled on 180 degree turnbacks (R40) or more points placed fter each other. So I went up for three train motors, but even an infrared V2 receiver can't serve their needs and SBrick also allows synced run of more motor units.

This synced run the other thing I really need to work - with two motors in coupled run the train reaching the curved slowed down too much and had been pushed out by the second unit by the coupler, so this was an another reason to go up for three motors.

Also PF train motors are different and newer series are worse - the bottom part of the motor has a number XX JX, where X are digits between 0-9, the first XX seems to be random, but JX shows the "age" of the motor, J0-J1 as oldest and increasing X mean newer series motor. J0s and J1s are simply faster and stronger when top perfomance is needed - but this difference is not noticeable when you run LEGO-set sized train. 

 

I'm pretty sure you will run your loops with motorising this wonderful EMU - I worked on it for around 3 years to find a good solution and make my trains run almost flawlessly. :)

EDIT: Also you can check my design here, as I upload every LDD's I managed to build for real bricks to help anyone else who wants to figure out how my builds work:

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=573893

I think for you car length the pivot point of shared bogies should be moved 1 more stud more under the carriages to make it run on R40 geometry.

[Stefaneris]

Thanks for your ideas. I will post a seperate thread when I finnish my train. As you pointed out, the windows are two studs apart, which also doesn't look good compared to the original. So there are several things I want to change.

Ontopic: I think it's great how there are quite a lot of different MOC interpretations of this FLIRT (same might also be right for the Big Boy, Santa Fe etc.) where everyone has it's own building style but everyone's train is instantly recognisable.

[Ashi Valkoinen]

On 7/21/2018 at 10:03 AM, Stefaneris said:

Ontopic: I think it's great how there are quite a lot of different MOC interpretations of this FLIRT (same might also be right for the Big Boy, Santa Fe etc.) where everyone has it's own building style but everyone's train is instantly recognisable.

...aaand here I am with the next interpretation of the next generation - the FLIRT3 train of GySEV railway company got finally real in bricks and was publicly displayed for first time next to the real train on her first run with passangers onboard!

This variation of my Stadler FLIRT design also needed some fundamental changes - the middle cars are longer by 5 studs (on more window between the two doors) which needed some changes at rotation points of shared bogies to make the train run on R40-based geometry as well. Other important and more noticable change is the front design - thanks to the more strict TSI standads related to collisions and energy absorbing the FLIRT trains of Stadler have been changed a lot, and it is really remarkable at the front design. The more roboust design was fortunately easier to do with bricks than the previous FLIRT-design. The only thing I had to think a lot was colouring - the bottom part under each car is a color which doesn't exist in LEGO - it should be "very dark bluish gray". I was thinking about using black instead of dark bluish gray (and my LDD-plans were published with black design), but finally the front made me to use dark bluish gray - if you check the windscreen, it has a narrow, black, angled pattern under the windscreen and an another strip of dark bluish gray. This gray is the same what colour the train has at the doors and the bottom part - using black to represent "very dark bluish gray" would mean to lose this detail.

The new FLIRT3 is compatible with the older version both in real and in LEGO, their run can be synced through SBrick which delivers enough current from the battery box to the three PF train motors under the train. Similarly to my other three FLIRT train it has front/tail lights, which could be controlled independently and indoor lights. Fortunately Power Functions led lights have been improved during their production, and my leds bought for this project give much more light - they could be noticed in the train even when it runs in enlighten enviroment (they are still not visible by sunlight, just artifical lights).

I'm fortunately after some testruns (synced run, durability-test, battery test), and it works quite good, however it can eat the 6×2100 mAh batteries fast, so I have to look up for something with more storage capacity. I'm also planning to develope more on bogie details - current design works fine without falling apart but the real thing has little more details around the wheels. 

Comments and critics, as always, welcome.

[zephyr1934]

Looking good!