Hod Carrier

@zephyr1934 @Selander I shall be thrilled to be wrong because quite clearly the train should be dark blue, and if it isn't then LEGO should go and stand in a corner and have a good long think about their choices. However, I remain unconvinced, partly from looking at the colour as shown in the photos but also from looking at how it contrasts with the other colours. It just doesn't seem dark enough to me and I will wait to see for myself what shade it turns out to be. Experience has taught me to be cautious about the published CMYK values for LEGO colours. I had to print a sticker to go on the dark blue section of the tail flash of my SEPECAT Jaguar and used these values as my starting point. However, when I printed the sticker it came out waaaay too light. Even after progressively reducing the lightness I ended up with a colour that still does not match and is too pale.

Well we shall see when the set comes out. I understand entirely what you’re saying about lighting, etc, but I’m standing by my assertion that it’s not dark blue.

Apologies for duplicate posting, but I don’t believe the Orient Express set is dark blue. It could be standard blue, but I’m placing my money on dark azure.

Not so sure the coaches are dark blue. Just by happy accident I currently have a pile of dark blue parts on my table, and these photos aren’t as dark as those. If it’s not standard blue (and I’m not convinced that it isn’t) my money would be on dark azure.

I appreciate the arguments in support, but the problem is that it doesn’t look quite enough like it to be certain (at least not to my eyes). There’s any number of 4-6-0s that it could be based on, including quite a few that would never have been used on these trains. Primarily for the reasons I gave. There is no “Orient Express locomotive”. The Orient Express brand is all about luxury travel, not about the motive power. In some respects having a generic design leaves the door open for builders to take their own direction and make the locomotive they want to pair with the train.

No locomotive hauled the Orient Express. Every locomotive hauled the Orient Express. Then, as now, Orient Express are only concerned with the train and not the locomotive. They will have a contract with the various railways over whose metals they operate to provide suitable motive power for the service and it was up to the railways in question to roster whatever equipment they had available to the train. Obviously in most instances the railway companies would want to reflect the prestige of the service so they wouldn't use a ratty old freight engine unless there was nothing better available. So you can take any route you like and have free choice from the various express passenger locomotives used by any of the countries through which the Orient Express passed. Personally I don't think that TLG has necessarily based their design on anything specific, but rather given us a generic design based on their previous offerings because, to most people, all steam locos look the same. They're not going to know the difference between a French or an Austrian design. I imagine that this may be the trade-off that permits two passenger cars, as a larger more accurate loco would push the parts count up, taking the price with it, which could put off the casual buyer or non-train interested builder.

I recall being told that Meccano sets used to be sold with deliberate errors in the instructions to encourage their buyers to think like an engineer and solve the problem themselves. In a broadly similar vein, I don't think I've ever bought a LEGO set that I didn't mod at some level as they are almost all comically unlike the prototype they are portraying (see the Apollo Lander set for evidence). I'm sure that there will be constraints set on set designers regarding things like playability (and the need for the hatefully out-of-scale minifigure to fit inside it) that we as free-builders are not bound by, and I've no doubt that we'll see a whole raft of mods coming out shortly after the set itself. I consider that folk like us are at the top end of the LEGO scale, as we're able to design and build some really amazing stuff. Would I like to see LEGO incorporate some of the techniques we use? Yes. But are we really the people that the set is being aimed at? Are we where the volume of sales will come from? Probably not. No matter the shortcomings of the set it is likely to sell well enough to justify it's production, and if we benefit from the trickle-down of parts from it then that strikes me as a win. As for all the bickering, I just find it totally unedifying. If you don't like the set, don't buy it. If you can build a better one yourself, go right ahead and do it. Criticism of the design is fine, but we can have this discussion politely and respectfully.

To be fair, you can build your BTA entries at any time as long as they’re not more than two years old when you enter them.

@Vilhelm22 Thank you for the feedback. I'm glad it's proving familiar to a Londoner.

I'm going to speculate and say that it won't happen. It seems that @Cale is struggling to balance the various demands on his time and hasn't enough spare time to run Brick Model Railroader as perhaps he would like. There are matters relating to the past two years' contests that are still outstanding which really need to be attended to before setting a new contest for this year. It's a real shame and a pity, as I've always enjoyed the contest each year and the way that it energises the community. However, running contests clearly take up a lot of time for the organisers.

I'm not as much of an aficionado as yourself so I can't really say what the service frequency is now, and this was also a good few years back (although not as far back as 2008). I just remember coming out of Croydon East station and seeing one tram at the stop and two more queued up waiting their turn, although I was on my way somewhere so didn't have time to find out the reason. In the UK that's called "portion working" and is sometimes used on the railways. It's fine so long as one portion isn't delayed, as it can delay all the other portions, and that you don't have any problems coupling/uncoupling. It's also proven to be confusing to infrequent passengers who tend to board the wrong portion by mistake.

Whoops-a-daisy!! This is precisely the sort of factor that I was meaning needs to be considered when specifying a new fleet. The main connection and pivot is at floor level and is actually quite a simple arrangement. It does have a certain amount of "float" to deal with pitch and roll as well as yaw so that the suspended sections can move relative to the wheeled sections. There is also a connection at roof level which comprises brackets and a damper to accommodate the additional movement at roof level. You can see the sort of arrangements used on this data sheet from parts supplier Autotechnik GmbH. I agree. I think that a 5 car formation is more than adequate for on-street running as it can carry a good number of passengers while still being wieldy enough to operate in that environment. But even so, the real weakness of any tram system is where they cannot be fully segregated from road traffic. It only takes one idiot to block the tram lane and you get chaos. Mind you, queued trams is not unique to systems with excessively long trams, as I've seen a big queue of trams stacked up at a pinch-point on the Croydon system, and their trams are only 2 cars long. I am not sure precisely how it was done when there was a derailment at Croydon in 2016, where a tram overturned killing seven passengers and injuring many others, but from news videos it would appear that the accident site could not even be accessed by the crane eventually used for the recovery. The tram was somehow righted and put back on the rails and moved back down the track to where the crane and recovery vehicles had suitable access, whereupon the aforementiond burly blokes with big spanners split the unit into it's constituent parts before it was craned onto trailers for removal by road. I would expect that had the same incident affected a longer unit the same approach would have been taken. It's part of the problem with having fixed formations, and it's not limited to trams. There have been train derailments in Europe and elsewhere involving fixed formation trains, some of which have also overturned and ended up on their sides. Due to restrictions on access, I can't imagine that they could have been recovered as a single formation in one go, but rather were split in situ and then recovered one vehicle at a time.

@Yperio_Bricks Good things will happen.

If no-one minds me putting on my professional hat and indulging in the topic drift a little further... Modern multi-section trams are not expected to be separated except very rarely, maybe once every few years or so for activities such as for routine heavy maintenance or accident repair. The same actually applies to the majority of conventional modern trains also, a significant number of which cannot be split except by a burly bloke with a big spanner. I would imagine that splitting a tram with suspended sections would simply involve putting the suspended section onto stands before removing the kingpin and other connections (air/electrical/hydraulic), and then wheeling the carrying sections away from it. The limiting factor is, as hinted, the maintenance facilities themselves. Often times, fleet procurement will be tied-in with upgrades to the maintenance facilities, with maximum vehicle/formation length being dictated by, among other things, the length of the shed roads and associated equipment. If an operator is investing in 9-car formations, then you can bet that their maintenance facilities are set-up for this length of tram. Modern maintenance facilities will have things like raised roads, vehicle lifts long enough to deal with full-length formations, in-situ bogie/equipment drop pits and wheel lathes, mobile access platforms and powered hoists which would enable local teams and contractors to effectively strip-down an entire tram. There are advantages with having trams formed up from pairs of half-sets, but there are also trade-offs and ideally you'd want the fleet to run in stable, fixed formations as much as possible for maximum efficiency. You can have improved availability through increased fleet resilience (e.g. a tram can be reformed while a fault with one half-set is rectified) but it does complicate depot operations due to the increased need for shunting operations and the need to match half-sets at similar points in their maintenance cycles as far as possible. On the capacity point, longer trams will add capacity as long as the frequency is not reduced. The easiest way to think about it is in cars per hour along a given route. If you double the length of the trams but halve the frequency the capacity remains unchanged. Reducing frequency can also make a service less attractive to users. [/drift]

@XG BC Using the tube is definitely an experience, and not always easy for a first-time user. I guess it's just a legacy of the age of the network and the conditions under which it was developed. Modern systems benefit from advances in tunneling technology that weren't available over 100 years ago, and the rights to tunnel under buildings is now more established than it was back then.