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Mestari

[MOC] Railway station with signal box and level crossing

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I would like to present my latest railway station with signal box and level crossing:

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It does not have the interior (only the signal box does) although I did plan to do it at the beginning, hence all the double walls with different colours on the inside.

The station is based on the station in Siedlisko Czarnkowskie located in the west of Poland. It is of course modified and was just the inspiration, but still - was recognized by the locals, so I guess it is similar enough :)

The main objective that I had when building this was to have some comfortable place for 8-wide trains to stop by. I hope I this was achieved :)

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Some of you may know that I focus mainly on modulars and I try to mix them with a little bit of technic. So far I was able to incorporate 9V and PF lights into my builds, some PF motors and pneumatics. Now, it was time for an SBrick and technic flex system :) It was one of my favorite systems back then. And now that I had this opportunity to control boom barriers with it, I couldn't help myself :)

So, we've got and SBrick, which controls M-motor, which in turn operates small linear actuator which pulls or pushes out the technic flex system cables. Those are connected to the boom barriers. Here you can see how it looked like during construction:

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The whole system was not so easy to calibrate at the beginning, but once done it worked seamlessly during exhibitions. It is also easy to dismantle for transportation. However it did took me two months to figure this system out. Maybe the easiest solutions are the hardest to invent...

The track layout is a little bit different to the usual one. This was forced by the planned commodity station of my friend from the LUG, but that was never built... Here you can see it in more detail as well as how the station was placed in the town I made with my LUG:

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And last but not least, interior of the signal box and a video of operating the boom barriers:

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LINK to the video (I don't know how to embed...)

Here's the link to the gallery on BrickSafe.

Edited by Mestari

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Nice! A good simple crossing barrier control.    The one thing I will say is that the barriers should be on different sides, but apart from that it's great.  I've wondered if an 'aeroplane train' like that would work and I've never tried, but it looks like it does.

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Thank you both for comments :)

Vilhelm22: I would definitely prefer to have those barriers on different sides as that is much more common, but that would mean much more pain in synchronizing and transportation. I decided against it in my first attempt with the crossing. But it is coming in my second for the 2019 layout :)

Probably...

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Very clean looking town. And well organized with the disco outside the townplan :classic:. I'm new to the train forum and I especially notice that you are not using MILS for the landscaping but regular baseplates and road baseplates. It's the first time that I see the leaves used so widely as bushes. It works for me and I'm going to remember this. The station looks great.

The dome on the church also looks great. Do you have a detail photo of that? 

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Fantastic creation! All of the buildings, road vehicles, and trains would make great MOCs by themselves, but together the whole is greater than the sum of the parts!

4 hours ago, pelle said:

Very clean looking town. And well organized with the disco outside the townplan :classic:. I'm new to the train forum and I especially notice that you are not using MILS for the landscaping but regular baseplates and road baseplates. It's the first time that I see the leaves used so widely as bushes. It works for me and I'm going to remember this. The station looks great.

The dome on the church also looks great. Do you have a detail photo of that? 

I would also like to see a close-up of the church!

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An excellent little layout. The aeroplane-train looks nice, and the details in the building and vehicles is excellent. Watching the barriers is pleasing, they operate at a nice speed. Have you considered automating them, or alternatively providing a button that viewers could press to operate the crossing? Either way saves you having to stand there with your phone every time the train goes past!

For a real challenge for the next crossing, have a look in the spoiler. :wink:

Spoiler

How about building a 4-barrier crossing? The barriers don't all drop in sync; the ones before the crossing go slightly before the ones after, so as to give traffic on the crossing time to leave, without permitting more to enter. My poor ascii-art diagram below is for a left-hand drive country:

 / for barrier up, - for barrier down

1. /  \       2. /  -      3. -  -
     /  \          -  \          -  -

You can better see what I mean here: 

I have no idea whether this happens in other countries, but it would be a brilliant feature to add.

(Also, for the video, just copy-and paste the URL from youtube and it should automatically embed.)

Overall, you've done a great job with this creation, well done. I'm looking forward to seeing more!

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The guy that made the church is Jellyeater :) Here is the link to the folder on his Bricksafe with the church: LINK

@ColletArrow: That indeed would be a challenge... I'm not sure if I would be able to reproduce this, although I think I already know which parts I would have to use to do it in a pure mechanical way. We'll see. I have probably too many plans for the 2019 ;)

 

Oh, and by the way - the only pieces of the layout that are mine are: this station with signal box, level crossing, the palm house that can be seen behind the signal box and that big tan Ministry of Brick :) that I still need to find some time to publish...

The trains are done by Michał (melerro on flickr). There were 26 contributors to that layout, all from LUGPOL :)

 

And about the operating of the booms. I was giving the phone to children to operate it themselves. That way they had something to touch and interact and he bricks were left alone :) automation wouldn't do the trick. 

Edited by Mestari

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Very nice crossing, smooth operation and the station looks good. The dark red profile bricks work well in this model.

On 7/3/2018 at 12:57 PM, Mestari said:

The track layout is a little bit different to the usual one. This was forced by the planned commodity station of my friend from the LUG, but that was never built... Here you can see it in more detail as well as how the station was placed in the town I made with my LUG:

Too bad, that would have been interesting to see, in its absence (next time) you could build up remnants of a foundation as if the building had been torn down so as to preserve and present the footprint, without the building having to actually be built.

All sorts of strange things in the background (an SP black widow Alco in Poland?) but I clicked on the link to your friends trains and that makes sense. And did I see the lower part of the legs for a full sized C3P0? Is that an official lego build or was that an insanely huge MOC?

 

 

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21 hours ago, zephyr1934 said:

Very nice crossing, smooth operation and the station looks good. The dark red profile bricks work well in this model.

Too bad, that would have been interesting to see, in its absence (next time) you could build up remnants of a foundation as if the building had been torn down so as to preserve and present the footprint, without the building having to actually be built.

All sorts of strange things in the background (an SP black widow Alco in Poland?) but I clicked on the link to your friends trains and that makes sense. And did I see the lower part of the legs for a full sized C3P0? Is that an official lego build or was that an insanely huge MOC?

Thank you :)

And I'm sorry for the pictures - not all are clear and containing just the station. But it was too big to fit in any space for photography that I had available and instead I had to make the photos on an exhibition.

The C3P0 is an official LEGO build that children are building during the event. It usually takes a day to put it together. And you get a proper LEGO hammer to make sure it stays together (it's rather huge and gives strange satisfaction when you whack those bricks with it...)

 

The SP black widow Alco was a modification of a MOC (but I don't know whose MOC) that was originally narrower and here can be seen in 8-wide version. I simply took two shortest trains my friend had available and took for the exhibition. Length and durability of trains were of most concern to me as we only had standard LEGO curves. Maybe next time we'll try our luck with BrickTracks R104. But we're a small LUG, so it's quite challenging to put such display already. R104 would only force it to be bigger. We'll see...

Edited by Mestari

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