MOC: WIP-Ghost Train

[cgarison]

Well, it has taken several months of planning and building to get to the point where I could run my Ghost Train MOC around PennLUG's "Snailtopia" layout at Philly Brickfest. I have to send out a special thanks to KC a.k.a. Kreative Snail in the Lego Community for letting me participate in this weekends events.

First off, these pictures are of what I call the "functional beta" or version 0.75 of the Ghost Train as I know my design has a huge number of flaws and this weekend brought out many of those including the lack of power from using only 1 Power Functions train motor.

So here are the pictures of my MOC as it set on the layout earlier today.

And of course, trains photos are meaningless unless I they have some videos of the train in motion so here is the Ghost Train in action.

So now I have about 8 weeks to improve the train and put it back into action for what should be the official version at PhilCon.

Edited September 15, 2014 by cgarison

[rogul]

sooo cool.. awesome job

[dr_spock]

Awesome and spooky. So many bones. Is it 6 more weeks until Halloween?

Did you have traction tires on the drivers?

Edited September 15, 2014 by dr_spock

[bjorkan]

very nice and something very special :)

[-Zond-]

Oh, it's awesome!)

A lot of bones... so scary.....

[Zerobricks]

That looks really sinister and awesome!

[cgarison]

Thanks for the compliments. I tried to make it look spooky and friendly all at the same time. As I think about the next iteration, I think a little less "cute" and a little more sinister is going to be happening.

Awesome and spooky. So many bones. Is it 6 more weeks until Halloween?

Did you have traction tires on the drivers?

Actually, it is six weeks to Halloween, but PhilCon (a science fiction, fantasy and horror artists/writers convention) is taking place in Cherry Hill, NJ on Nov. 21st through the 23rd. So the goal for the rebuild is to be ready by the 14th so that I have time to work out the kinks and bugs. I am not sure what our LUG has in store for Fantasy, but we will certainly have part of the Moonbase core with Nate Brill's suspended monorail (less Peter Morris' Space Train which is headed to North Carolina).

As far as the traction drivers go, I have the regular, large driver wheels run through the power functions motor on the locomotive and have the white, small rubber bands only on the the back two driver wheels. When I started the weekend, I began with only the two rear rubber bands and I thought I could improve performance by going to 4 rubber bands, but the added friction was more of a hindrance rather than a help. So, they rubber band came off the front driver wheels and I used only the ones on the back. But, now you are going to say that you cannot see the white band on the rear driver wheel in the photo and that is very true because the white bands turned as black as the wheels after having run for about 8 hours over the course of 3 days on 9 volt metal track from 2002.

Also, turning the larger diameter wheels with the train motor makes this little beast quite hard to control. Three clicks of the remote does not provide enough torque to make it through the turns while that fourth click is just right and that fifth click is downright scary. The good news is that I only got the train to the scary fast setting once and proceed to sling a jail car and the caboose off the tracks. I caught the caboose as it sailed from our display, but missed the jail car which crashed to the concrete floor below. The good news is that all the pieces were found and the car was rebuilt in about 3 minutes.

On the next version of this MOC, power is going to be coming from 2 M-motors using a design that was described to me by the great folks at GFLUG while we shared a space with them at BrickFair, VA. It will not run nearly as fast as the train motor, but it will have a longer lasting and more steady delivery of power. And with the tips from the GFLUG members, I am hoping to avoid some issues that we have had with fleet of trains in the past. But as with all things in Lego, some new stress point will be revealed with the new design and I will be off finding a modification to fix that issue.