Recreating old trains with new parts?

[McWaffel]

Hey guys,

I haven't been in the forums for a while but I recently decided I wanted to finally complete my Santa Fe train. Buying a used or new set is completely out of the question, since I'm not willing to pay anything close to the collectors prices that people ask for. 

So I thought it might be a viable option to recreate the sets using new, currently in production parts as substitutes for the actual ones. A lot of the parts, like the pearl grey textured 1x2 bricks and most of the parts in the "old grey" are crazy expensive. I thought of using light blueish gray substitutes and maybe dark blueish gray for the textured 1x2 bricks. 

Has anyone here ever done something like this? Is it worth the effort? I thought of using bricklink to part out the sets into a wishlist and then substitute the parts colors with current ones. Is this the way to go or are there easier ways to do this? 

Thanks for your advice/comments. :) 

[Matt Dawson]

Your best bet would be to add the set as a new wish list and colour swap the light grey to light bluish grey. Many people have done it and there's not much difference on it's own but it's quite noticeable when next to the original IMHO.

[Roadmonkeytj]

One of my Lug members just did this very thing...  He still spent 150 on just the engine but he swapped in the Bluetooth which made it nice...  We ran it on the layout with another members original SF and they looked great together! 

[McWaffel]

Thanks for the feedback. I just did a WL on bricklink and recolored all "light grey" parts to "light blueish grey" and "dark grey" to "dark blueish gray". Then I removed the stickers, replaced the bogies with the current yellow ones and replaced the old magnets with current ones and I went from 300€ down to almost 75€. 

I still think that's a bit steep but it seems a lot more reasonable now. 

[Roadmonkeytj]

I try to aim for 80-150 usd when building a engine not sure the conversion to € currently.

[3797]

8 hours ago, Roadmonkeytj said:

... not sure the conversion to € currently.

Looking that up should take less than five seconds as long as you aren't on dial-up.

[fred67]

Definitely worth it.  I was fortunate to win the Super Chief in an auction for around $100, so was pretty happy, but the cars are just as bad - so I recreated using parts I had and bricklinking the rest.  I started with black roofs, because the curved slope wasn't available in LBG at the time - at least not in quantity from anywhere, but I subsequently was able to use LBG later on.

[Roadmonkeytj]

7 hours ago, 3797 said:

Looking that up should take less than five seconds as long as you aren't on dial-up.

No just another window and a pain in mobile lol