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I am moving to Alaska soon and my intrawebz searches have yielded no success in finding a LUG there. Does anyone know if an Alaskan LUG exists?

I came up with a quick idea on how to have working driving rods for the locomotive. It is very simple and does not require that many parts. Here are the parts that I used.

Ever since I purchased the Emerald Night set back in 2011, I have fallen in love with it. One of the first modifications that I made was powering the locomotive without the XL Motor taking up the cab and detracting from the overall play value. Finding alternate power sources led to the creating of other locomotives of the Emerald Night class. My style of locomotives is a mix of North American and European designs, and is greatly reflected in my 4-8-4 Emerald Northern (shown further down). 4-6-2 Emerald Night This is the original Emerald Night, which has undergone some slight cosmetic modifications to improve the overall look. I was very impressed with this set and as such I wanted to change as little as possible. Perhaps the largest change was installing a Power Functions Train Motor under the tender. 4-6-4 Emerald Baltic The Emerald Baltic came about after the second version of my Emerald Northern. I pretty much took the firebox, cab, and trailing truck from the Northern and stuck it onto the original Emerald Night. Then I used the tender from my improved Emerald Night and changed the front cowls. I named this one "Emerald Baltic" since it sounded better than "Emerald Hudson". North American influence is shown through the wheel arrangement since the 4-6-4 was more widely used in North America compared to the rest of the world (at least to my understanding). 4-8-4 Emerald Northern The 4-8-4 Emerald Northern would have to be my pride and joy locomotive. I have been working for a few years to perfect this locomotive. Once I think that I have it right, I find something new to improve it. It features Power Functions Lights above the smoke box and the tender (which is an improvement over the original Emerald Night since I have a larger tender to work with), two L-Motors in the boiler, and lots of other small details to help the locomotive just pop. The 4-8-4 wheel arrangement was not that popular nor widely used outside of North America. The external sand and steam domes and streamlined nose are also of North American influence. Any comments, critiques, and constructive criticism is welcome!

Everything that I build I design so that it works on regular LEGO track, and my hope is that it looks well while traversing the track. My "Disney Locomotive" has its frame based upon Nick Jackson's Midland 4F, which can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/94581721@N06/albums/72157646570249721 His frame is amazing since it allows the L-Motor to sit between the driving wheels and underneath the boiler.

It has been a while since I posted here, but I figured that I would post some WIP pictures of a new locomotive that I have been working on. It (and the eventual train cars that it will pull) are inspired by the new Disney Minifigures. With that in mind, the locomotive and train cars will have odd proportions and some "silly" designs. The colors are not final, although I may keep the main part of the boiler tan. Any input and constructive criticism is welcome!

As requested:

For which locomotive?

Unfortunately Naco Enterprises is awaiting funds to be released for the production of many products and end items by customer organizations. By that I mean that I am still trying to convince my wife to let me order parts for lots of my MOCs.

I have done some more work with various locomotives, so here is an update. 2-6-4 I redesigned the tender on the 2-6-4 to have better access to the batteries so that they could be removed without having to take the entire battery box out. The AA battery box is integrated into the tender's structure so I had to be creative with the construction. 0-6-0 After the L-Motor was released in LDD I had to see how it integrated into designs that used a pieced together L-Motor. The 0-6-0 had to be modified slightly to make room for it, with the main difference being the raising of the rear end of the boiler by one plate. Nick Jackson has assured me that in real bricks the raising of the IR Receiver by one plate is not necessary. 0-8-0 This side view of the 0-8-0 shows how I am working with empty space under the boiler and between the frame to make a more realistic locomotive. While I am using pictures as inspiration, I am adding my own touch to everything.

This thread did start out by being just about my Emerald Night variations, but then it just became my overall WIP/MOC thread. I tried naming the locomotives differently, but I did not like it since it did not tie them back to the original class that they were based upon.

Here is some more work on the 0-8-0. While I am using Duq's BR 55 as a base for the frame I will be doing my own custom work for the boiler, cab, and tender.

Thank you for the feedback! I went with the double smokestack for several reasons, the primary reason being is that it does look odd and I wanted to include that in this custom build. The second being that since this is designed more for freight hauling (since it does have two XL-Motors) having a second smokestack shows that it has to have that extra release for the amount of pressure and power this produces.

After branching out with the 2-6-4 from my normal steam locomotive designs of Emerald Night variations, I decided to make a steam locomotive that focuses more on the greebles around the driving wheels. For that I turned to Duq's BR 55 locomotive (https://www.flickr.com/photos/duq/sets/72157633633010873), which they so graciously provided some "how it was done" pictures.

A 2-8-4 of this would not be hard to do since you would just have to extend the boiler and lower frame by about 4 studs. I will upload all of my recent work onto MOCpages eventually.

I pretty much completed my 2-6-4. I thoroughly enjoyed this build since it was much different than what I normally do. As with anything, any constructive comments and critique is always welcome.

While two L-Motors will fit inside the boiler, the issue lies with routing the wires. This is why I downgraded to M-Motors. The Emerald Baltic is only longer than the Emerald Night in the firebox area (so four studs), and would not really be feasible due to the same issues (and to keep the same general look and features).

For FebRovery (a Classic Space thing), I created a Maintenance of Way rover to service the Classic Space train tracks. While Earthly vehicles have the train wheels flip down, I took artistic and creative liberty to switch them.

Seeing as how this is Mr. Sava, aka a member of the Train Diety Pantheon, it should get a lot of support.

It was requested of me last year (see what I did there?) to post some pictures of the passenger cars that were used on my Arctic Swift Christmas train. They are practically recolored Emerald Night coaches with some extra festive greebles.

I am taking "artistic freedom" with this since my 2-6-4 is not based on anything in particular.

The black and red just work well for the 2-6-4. Realistically the double smoke stack would probably never be used on a locomotive of this size, but once again I like the look. I want to add some more greebles and details to the lower part of the boiler just above the driving wheels, but I am unsure what to do with the limited space.

The Train God hath spoken.

Just check out my thread called "Emerald Night class locomotives" where you will see some of my work, including my new WIP 2-6-4!

The Freedom Train suggestion gives me the idea to mix the Daylight in freedom colors with the Freedom Gundam from Gundam SEED.

I would suggest powering both trucks in the tender with XL-Motors, which if you look at Tony's pictures on flickr (and several other people) you can see how they are done. That setup will definitely give you the power that the Allegheny is known for. Although it is replicating other people's work, it is a setup that works great. I will eventually create a tender-powered locomotive with that exact same setup because it is so effective.