MOD: Conrail GP40 in the style of the Maersk locomotive

[zephyr1934]

I am happy to finally be able to present my version of a Conrail GP40 [full gallery]

The obvious resemblance to the Maersk locomotive from set 10219 is deliberate and I would call this build a MOD rather than a MOC. I wanted to approach the Maersk locomotive from a clean slate with the objectives of:

(1) replicating a common North American locomotive (yeah, there was that NS unit, but that was only one engine, Conrail alone had a 275 GP40's).

(2) With the lack of a "Creator Expert" train on the market right now, provide an affordable "gateway" build for new AFOL train fans looking for something more meaty than the city train sets.

(3) Since this is meant to be a gateway MOD, keep the parts costs as low as possible. As of this writing, probably over $100 worth of the parts for this build can be found in set 60052. This includes a pair of blue train base plates (hence the pair of locomotives), the 6x16 tile to cover the PF gear, and of course all of the PF parts (not to mention a supply of track to run on). As my grandfather used to say, when TLG hands you blue train bases, make Conrail.

(4) Having built a few heavy freight cars recently and acquiring wide radius curves from ME models, I am now in need of a few PF diesel freight engines.

This build keeps the form factor from the Maersk, but a lot of the actual build is different, including a few new tricks (e.g., the exhaust stack). Since N. American locomotives rarely travel alone I had to build a pair (oh, and there is that second blue base plate in 60052 that would otherwise be lonely). One is powered (3051) and one is not (3245). Rather than use the 6x16 tile on the unpowered unit, I built the long hood on 3245 out of regular bricks. As I look at the two together, I like the smooth side better, but it is not easy to hide 4 wide PF in a 4 wide hood.

With this MOD I have also addressed some of what I think are shortcomings in the original Maersk design, chief of which was doing away with the high friction technic axles for the loco trucks and adding a second motor under the powered unit for more pulling power. I am even using a purist PF reverser switch inside the hood, so there is a lot of wire stuffed in the space that remains.

One of the things that really makes a build pop is the lettering. These locomotives have been complete for a few weeks, but the stickers misprinted and I had to redo the lot. I was finally able to apply them this past weekend (more detail on the sticker process can be found here)

The basic design is meant to be customizable. I personally like the look of the unpowered unit and if I did not already have way too many 9v diesels I would probably put a 9v motor under it.

I did my best to keep costs down by avoiding rare parts, of course if someone had a ton of 1x8's those could easilly be substituted for the 1x4's... or on the unpowered unit one could use 2x4's. There are still a few expensive parts that could be substituted out, e.g., 1x1 bricks with stud on the side are a little pricy in blue right now. There was the use of the blue train base plates, fairly common at the moment, hence the Conrail design. Then more subtle tweaks, for example the hand rails are completely different, borrowing the clip idea from the BNSF set 10133 to eliminate one set of expensive hoses and then using bars instead of hose for the railing to eliminate the other set of expensive hoses.

I plan on releasing the instructions for free as a gateway to the hobby and selling the stickers for those who really like the build. The instructions will come out as soon as I can finish cleaning up the LDraw file (a few weeks) and if there are any early adopters I could start taking requests for the stickers now (send a PM). In my opinion the stickers are good quality (as shown in the pictures) but not perfect if look closely (also as shown in the pictures).

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full gallery]

[lanesteele240]

Very nice

[Commander Wolf]

Especially fond of your lovely decals; nice work!

What is the purpose of the pf reverser switch? Is it because you need to have both of the wired ends of the PF train motors facing the center of the locomotive?

[MusicaRibelle]

excellent job, good to see many suggestions and improvements on the maersk and a nice customization overall.

You should really be proud of your decals, you've done an excellent job and the loco pair look fantastic.

Now we'll want to see the actual complete freight train on the ME large radius curves..

Brick on!

[zephyr1934]

Thanks all for the kind words,

Especially fond of your lovely decals; nice work!

What is the purpose of the pf reverser switch? Is it because you need to have both of the wired ends of the PF train motors facing the center of the locomotive?

When it comes to making the decals it really helps to have the fonts from www.railfonts.com.

At one point in the design process I was banging my head on how to wrap the decals around the air vent on the fireman's side. Then it hit me, brick build that part and problem solved. So only the "C" is a decal, the main stripes are white plates. As a result, I had to tweak the proportions of the Conrail C so that it would be 1/3-1/3-1/3. The real stripe is more like 2/5-1/5-2/5... but don't tell anyone (grin).

Yes, the pole reverser is to allow two motors. That is one problem with this design, the only spot to drop the motor wires down is in the middle of the base plate. So the two motors have to face different directions, and thus, if keeping it pure, you need to reverse the polarity on one of the motors. I stuffed it the hood ahead of the IR receiver (wow, the one PF part that is easy to conceal). On the original Maersk design that space is taken up with snot work.

Of course if you are building the base of a locomotive out of plates you can leave a hole at the rear to drop down the wire and have both motors facing the same direction.

excellent job, good to see many suggestions and improvements on the maersk and a nice customization overall.

You should really be proud of your decals, you've done an excellent job and the loco pair look fantastic.

Now we'll want to see the actual complete freight train on the ME large radius curves..

Brick on!

I'll get you that shot soon...

[King Aragorn]

Beautiful livery! I like the stickers!

[Legopold]

Good job on these beautiful locomotives! The modifications you applied to the design of the Maersk engine look good and the stickers are really excellent!

It is very meritorious that your intention was to create an affordable "gateway" for new train AFOLs. I personally do not like the currently available 2014 City trains that much, so I really see a need for a decent train without having to pay the enormous prices of the retired sets. I assume that it will be possible to get two of your Conrail locos (including PF) for the current price of one of the retired original Maersk sets.

One thing that I find a bit irritating is the color of your photos. To me your locos look more like medium blue than standard blue. I assume this is due to the lighting conditions used during the photography? Or is it just my perception or maybe my badly calibrated screen?

[MaineBrickFan]

Beautiful work, as always!

[LEGO Train 12 Volts]

Hey Zephyr see the twin locomotives is amazing ...your trains' collection is huge, and the decals are the icing on the cake!

Great work, as usual!

[leg01982]

Very very nice

[zephyr1934]

All ya all are way too kind, but thank you nonetheless.

Good job on these beautiful locomotives! The modifications you applied to the design of the Maersk engine look good and the stickers are really excellent!

It is very meritorious that your intention was to create an affordable "gateway" for new train AFOLs. I personally do not like the currently available 2014 City trains that much, so I really see a need for a decent train without having to pay the enormous prices of the retired sets. I assume that it will be possible to get two of your Conrail locos (including PF) for the current price of one of the retired original Maersk sets.

One thing that I find a bit irritating is the color of your photos. To me your locos look more like medium blue than standard blue. I assume this is due to the lighting conditions used during the photography? Or is it just my perception or maybe my badly calibrated screen?

I've been looking at lego trains for decades, but many of the sets in the 90's just struck me as too toy like. It was not until I saw the Super Chief that I realized, "wow, you can make realistic looking trains out of lego." So two hobbies joined and my latent model railroader was expressed in bricks. Sadly, with the lack of a creator train set, there is no gateway right now. Even with the creator sets the selection was so small that over half of the lego world could not build a local train. For most rail fans, I would expect their favorite train to be something that ran nearby or at least close to their home country. So while the HE was a nice set, it did not hit the "American train" that I prefer (that is not a criticism of the set, rather, a comment on the difficulty of serving the world with only one train set... I can only assume the Super Chief had a similar impact in Europe in its day). From what I've gathered, the Hobby train tried to address all of these issues, but lego bureaucracy munged that up. It still would be nice to have a true creator train set, i.e., instructions for three different models: an American locomotive, a European locomotive, and a pair of generic freight cars that could be either side of the Atlantic. While it would not cover all of the world, many (but not all) of the other parts of the world have trains similar to EU or US. My philosophy is that without an AFOL train set from lego, we the AFOL community need to produce our own good starter designs to open the door for others to enter this hobby.

As for price, you have to source the parts yourself. You can get a lot of the specialized parts in 60052, but you will still need a lot of blue bricks from elsewhere (e.g., the windows are common in police sets right now, if you have any sort of collection of simple bricks you should have some blue there that you can use, etc.). Oh, and many of those specialized parts are over and above the MSRP of the Maersk- which did not come with PF included. Since blue is a common color it should be far cheaper than the grays and Maersk blue of the Maersk locomotive.

Yes, the Conrail locomotives in my first post are in standard lego blue. Between my camera and my photo editing software the colors could have gotten distorted. Unfortunately the colors on my computer screen are incorrect so I've given up trying to color correct photos.

[dr_spock]

Great job on the Conrail engines. Brings back some fun memories when I used to watch the Conrail trains in my younger days.

[marook]

...

Yes, the pole reverser is to allow two motors. That is one problem with this design, the only spot to drop the motor wires down is in the middle of the base plate. So the two motors have to face different directions, and thus, if keeping it pure, you need to reverse the polarity on one of the motors. I stuffed it the hood ahead of the IR receiver (wow, the one PF part that is easy to conceal). On the original Maersk design that space is taken up with snot work.

Of course if you are building the base of a locomotive out of plates you can leave a hole at the rear to drop down the wire and have both motors facing the same direction.

That is one of the Cool things about the SBrick replacement for the IR sensor.. ! Simply reverse the motor in the settings! (And then it has 4 outputs, not 2.. lights on!)

[zephyr1934]

That is one of the Cool things about the SBrick replacement for the IR sensor.. ! Simply reverse the motor in the settings! (And then it has 4 outputs, not 2.. lights on!)

Oh, indeed, while I've not played with the SBrick, I presume it overcomes an even greater limitation of the PF IR- the limit of 4 channels.

For this build I wanted it to be purely Lego since a new AFOL builder probably would find sourcing regular lego parts a sufficient challenge.

Meanwhile, so far I have been impressed with the power of two PF train motors. Rather than stalling out, the locomotive is powerful enough that it breaks the connection at the magnets when pulling a heavy train... though that may be due to weaker magnets. Most of my trains have the old 9v magnets and these locomotives have the newer sealed magnets. The connection seems weaker, but it maybe at the connection between the sealed magnet to 9v magnet. I have not yet done a full diagnostic. Does anyone else have any experience with a difference in magnet strength- old/old vs. new/new vs. old/new???

[pirzyk]

Meanwhile, so far I have been impressed with the power of two PF train motors. Rather than stalling out, the locomotive is powerful enough that it breaks the connection at the magnets when pulling a heavy train... though that may be due to weaker magnets. Most of my trains have the old 9v magnets and these locomotives have the newer sealed magnets. The connection seems weaker, but it maybe at the connection between the sealed magnet to 9v magnet. I have not yet done a full diagnostic. Does anyone else have any experience with a difference in magnet strength- old/old vs. new/new vs. old/new???

I can only talk about the new/new connections. I have found sometimes I need to twist the cars to get the magents to align, once they align the connection is OK. I have run about 5-7 cars log w/o having to add an additional neodymium magnet. For my really long container train (26 cars), I always use the magnet right behind the engine. I'll be doing a test in a few weeks with a 15 car passenger train.

[zephyr1934]

Just a quick note to announce that I have now posted the instructions. You can read more and discuss them here in this new thread...

[RuneJack]

Those are great looking engines

[lightningtiger]

Oh, how did I miss this MOC....wonderful design 'zephyr1934' and Brick On !

[zephyr1934]

Thanks for the kind words, and as per my last post, the instructions are posted for free... but that is all discussed in the other thread.

[pirzyk]

I can only talk about the new/new connections. I have found sometimes I need to twist the cars to get the magents to align, once they align the connection is OK. I have run about 5-7 cars log w/o having to add an additional neodymium magnet. For my really long container train (26 cars), I always use the magnet right behind the engine. I'll be doing a test in a few weeks with a 15 car passenger train.

Saturday I was able to run the 15 passenger cars with only the new/new connections, no neodymium magnet. Though I had to make sure I did not start the train on a curve and provide the power too quickly.

[zephyr1934]

Saturday I was able to run the 15 passenger cars with only the new/new connections, no neodymium magnet. Though I had to make sure I did not start the train on a curve and provide the power too quickly.

Cool, that is good to know. Next time I have a large layout I'll have to try swapping in a pair of new/new couplers at or near the locomotives. I kind of hope it doesn't outshine the older couplers too mucn though, I don't want to feel compelled to convert to the new couplers with all the trains I've got and then having to deal with the Euro style buffers on American rolling stock.

[zephyr1934]

Just a small update... somewhere along the line someone said, "looks great, but you really need to do that for CSX."

I have now produced stickers for two more railroads, CSX Dark Future scheme,

And UP,

Examples of the unapplied decals can be found here while the stickers can be purchased here.

I do not have instructions for the other railroads, but that is a nice "next step" away from standard instructions by making your own MOD. Of course these are generic enough that you should be able to use them on many other designs too.

Oh, and for you UP steam enthusiasts, especially Big Boy fans, I have a treat for you too,

[lostdriveway]

Just a small update... somewhere along the line someone said, "looks great, but you really need to do that for CSX."

I have now produced stickers for two more railroads, CSX Dark Future scheme,

And UP,

Examples of the unapplied decals can be found here while the stickers can be purchased here.

I do not have instructions for the other railroads, but that is a nice "next step" away from standard instructions by making your own MOD. Of course these are generic enough that you should be able to use them on many other designs too.

Oh, and for you UP steam enthusiasts, especially Big Boy fans, I have a treat for you too,

Awesome! Just might have to put together a UP one! Now I also really need a Big Boy!!

[zephyr1934]

Heh heh, you know, looking back, the UP stickers were one of the big things missing from Jake McKee's getting started with lego trains book from ten years ago (and EVERYONE needs a Big Boy, grin)