Mr Benn

I managed to get one of these unexpectedly when I placed my recent order, which was nice. For those who missed out though - the whole thing is surely production parts - probably even the little ship picture is going to crop up somewhere else (i.e. in the other half of the set coming soon!) - and so I suspect this would be reasonably easy and inexpensive to piece together from PaB :)

I don't think they'll ever release them. And actually I think everyone would rather they put out new ones rather than rehashing old sets... Cafe Corner is pretty prohibitive to either buy or even piece together - too many of the bricks used are currently out of use so I've had a look into it and made the decision to neither buy it or piece it tgoether from PaB/bricklink... Market Street on the other hand - with a few substitutions (buying 3 1x4 flat bricks for the no longer available sand blue 1x4 bricks, and colour changes from white to black balconies) I put one together for about £120. And you may not even want to tdo the garage on the side as it doesn't add much, so you'll be able to get the 16 wide building pieced for under £100.

Was in the Lego shop in Liverpool today seeing as I'm here for a work meeting - some quite nice and different stuff on the PaB wall today! Sorry I haven't any pictures, but they had... 2x2 Navy blue (the same colour as the Apple Tree House roof) corner roof bricks 2x2 yellow tiles 1x2 roof slopes in blue & green 2x4 Dark red bricks (not seen them in this colour before!) 2x2x2 white roof slops (the same shape as the dresses) White doors and the barred door (but no door frames!) Also lots of nice little bricks such as black and tan 1x2 flats to fill up the gaps... And finally some really good random stuff in the build a minifig section - no good heads, but there were child legs in tan and purple, medieval skirts, quite a good variety of female headpieces and some really random accessories - I found croissants, plates, translucent pink chefs hats and mugs, and some strange thing that looked like a baby bottle or a mustard squeezy bottle in white with a handle! Maybe old Belville pieces?! No other sale stuff though sadly, and they'd run out of the Christmas giveaway set so no incentive to spend too much there!

As for 'saving them for the kiddies', I was in the Lego shop in Liverpool this morning and there was a kid who must have been 7-8 feeling the packs to get the ones he wanted - sounds like he found 2 Royal Guards - the very nice chap in the shop actually asked if he had the ones he wanted the kid's mum was saying how he could always find any fig he wanted! It's their smaller, more sensitive fingers - we should all be sending kids out to feel the bags for us ;-)

Just a personal preference, but I'd say less road plates and just more things for buildings to go on - 'landloacked' buildings can always be reached by paths laid down between the two/three buildings it is behind! Also try to get a loop of rail or none at all unless you're only running non-motorised trains - even a simple loop enhances the play value and aesthetic appeal of a layout like this. Finally, since you've run out of new modulars to buy, start building your own - all of a sudden it will raise your little town out of the clone towns and into a league of its own!

You may find it useful to download the Bluebrick software - it will help you arrage your plates and show you how much track you need - search elsewhere on the forums for it (I'm sure you can find a download somwehre in the train tech thread!) As a general rule, 2 straight tracks = 32 studs ~ 25-26 cm - I can get 6 plates in a row onto a 150 table with a tiny (1-2cm) overhang at each end. One thing - the Emerald Night is definitely longer than you think - the loco with tender itself is about 4 track sections long - if you want it to really look nice you might want more straight track than you originally thought :)

I'm not a big fan of 'the hunt' I have to say. I'd much rather just get what I want and go... All power to anyone who has the time to feel through several boxes of minifigs I say. Yes, of course it may mean that others may miss out, but this is, in many ways, the entire concept of shops - you can buy what you want. Feeling through tbe bags doesn't damage the product in any way so I just say go for it... Since they gave up with barcodes though, for the last couple waves I've just bought an entire sealed box of the figs from friendly local retailers like Toymaster or John Lewis - it makes no odds to them who is buying it and it guarantees me three sets of figures - I'm not really an army builder, I just like having all the different minifig parts to build my own ones! :)

Hi Wingedman - just checked and the Winter Toy Shop is still available on the Lego site in the UK! Like the bakery, it just doesn't seem to feature in any other pages at the moment. http://shop.lego.com/en-GB/Winter-Toy-Shop-10199

Am very much in your position - have relatively recently dug out all the 12V stuff that I amassed as a lucky child... I tend to get most of my stuff from Ebay. I am assuming that you are in the UK what with using words like 'chap', which makes life a lot easier (as 12V was never actually sold in the USA), as Europe is still awash with 12V fans! Everything to do with 12V is quite expensive though, and as soon as you start getting in the the electrically operated parts such as points and signals, the cost really tends to ramp up. Track can be easy to come by but prices on Ebay really fluctuate - sometimes you can get a great deal on Ebay, but check out bricklink and make sure you know what the general price of track is on there first. For trains I've found that the 7745 is often going to be the best bargain on Ebay - you can often get it complete and extra coaches are easy to come by and replace parts for. Also, as it was one of the later trains, the motors often aren't quite as done in as some of the earlier trains! In terms of prices past trains and track, you're looking at about £30-40 for a set of remote controlled points, £40-50 for a remote signal, and loads for one of the (rather pointless) decouplers. The 12V transformers can often be found quite cheaply but beacuse there's a huge chunk of metal inside them shipping can often cost! One thing to bear in mind is that the new PF trains will run on 12V track - the gauge is the same - so you can run your 12V and PF trains at the same time (and this has the advantage that you can control trains independently rather than all via the main transformer). If you're looking for new trains this may make your life a lot less expensive - it means you can just take any train from 9v, RC or PF and chuck a PF receiver and motor inside it and you'll be good to go! The only disadvantage is that your PF trains wouldn't automatically stop at the 12V signals, but it's a small price to pay...

It's a complex build, but if you want a Flying Scotsman, your best bet is the very lovely Emerald Night - a great set for any train enthusiast (though your son will very likely need assistance to put it together) - still available from the Lego store at about £70 but nobody is sure for how much longer as it's been out a while!

Hi all - I don't have enough time to do a review as I have a 12 hour flight tomorrow, but I just wanted to say that I managed to pick up the new Lego Star Wars character encyclopedia in WH Smith in the UK today! It was on offer with £4 off at £11, but I see on Amazon.co.uk it's actually under £9... It's a surprisingly nice book just for one that takes you through all the different SW characters - I have no idea if it covers every single one but it's over 200 pages long, with some pages showing variants of different versions of characters too - it's not quite A4 size but definitely bigger than A5, with really nice, clear pictures of each minifigure... And it has an exclusive minifig too - a 'decorated hero' version of Han Solo, to go with the 'medal winner' Luke Skywalker that was an exclusive from the DK Visual Dictionary... Either way, seems like a pretty good buy for those with an interest in collecting the Lego SW figures!

I did this too a few months ago. Used PAB for all of the pieces, though had to substitute a few - the little design above the gate I've had to use different pieces, and my balconies are black - I also replaced the balcony doors just with clear windows too. I think it cost me about £140 in total - price was driven up by having replace the no-longer-produced navy blue (or whatever colour they call it) 1 x 4 bricks that make up the midsection of the house with 3 x the number of 1 x 4 plates in the same colour which are still produced! Really pleased with it, though I much prefer a set that comes all in the box!

You know that the elevating radar dish actually is a cargo elevator - the crates that go on the monorail slot right onto the bottom of that lift, the monotrail is designed to stop exactly where the container can be transferred on and off :)

Has anyone got any top tips for making the Graduate's gown stay down as opposed to making him look like he's in some sort of hurricane?

If it weren't for these 'all in one' sets being sold, it's likely that aside from the odd adult exclusive we would barely have any train sets at all. In just the same way as it's annoying to have to buy batteries for a toy separately, if you're an average adult who knows they'd like to buy their kid some Lego, but doesn't know all that much about what's available, the last thing they want to do is to have to pick up all the things they need for their kid to enjoy it separately. As far as I know, the only time this really happened with the powered trains is when you had to buy the 12V transformer/controller separately from the sets themselves, but since then they've been very parent friendly 'train sets in a box' which appeal more to the buyer. Nothing would be more disappointing for a kid on Christmas day to receive a train set - only to find you haven't got track to run on/a motor/a controller because it wasn't completely clear they were also needed. Also remember that for the 'standard' trains, AFOLs are NOT the target audience! These are toys, for kids, in order to generate the Lego train fans of the future! 25 years from now PF stuff might be worth plenty on ebay as kids who receive a nice big Lego train set this Christmas ride the wave of nostalgia, just like with me and my 12V days!

A great job here - very tempting to try and do the same with my own MMV, it's screaming out to be turned into a pub! All you need for your fire station is a Ghostbusters sign on the side...

In the UK - department store called John Lewis (not helpful for you in the USA I appreciate!). The Lego stores (and online) don't let you buy a whole box, they only let you have 16 - so I took my perfectly good money elsewhere... They were £1.95 each, standard retail price is £1.99 so I saved an enormous £2.40 on the case of 60!

So I bought a case of series 5 today (if you have the funds, it just makes life SO much easier!) Rather pleased with everything. Got three full sets, plus an extra... 1 x dinosaur man 1 x short clown 2 x London guards 2 x boxers 2 x zookeeper lady 1 x cavewoman 1 x detective 1 x lumberjack 1 x fitness instructor from the 80s So overall, pretty good score. The slightly strange thing about one of the figs that people are more excited about (for getting multiples I guess) - the graduate - is that there doesn't seem to be a way to make the cape flush with the body, mine all look like they've been caught in a gust of wind from underneath - am I missing something here? Pretty good set though, definitely on a par with series 4...

Really nice MOC, it was the yellow building that straightaway reminded me of Lisbon. And the graffiti on the side of the house too! I'd like to see you try to replicate some of the Calcadas that are so characteristic in Portugal, hope you've got plenty of black and white 1x1 tiles ;-) This would really be completed with a tram running by the front of the shops, centimetres from the door!

Perhaps it's a shop selling pets made out of Lego? They're much easier to keep and clean... Really liking this though - it's a great way to save a bit of space (currently thinking about my own lack of space and putting buildings up like thisto let trains run underneath) and I think that having a town on different layers really improves how it looks - not all of our towns are in Holland/Norfolk/(insert your own country's really flat place here) after all! I'd be interested to know what the internal structure is - is it all just Lego? Is this just the baseboard sitting on top of standard flat bricks (which I suppose would allow easy removal during the inevitable derailments!)?

I can't provide a direct answer to your question, but in the Milton Keynes Lego store the other day, after being given the option to either have a police bike or £5 off the Snape/Malfoy/HP Magnet set (and choosing the magnet set) the woman behind the desk told me that all the other sets are now glued, and that they're telling customers that the magnet figures are now glued on - I would figure that TLG have decided to avoid any sorts of complaints simply by highlighting this fact and that all future packaging will probably have the same label...

To echo what Mr Blue said - Lego customer service has always been excellent when I've had problems, though they can be really very chatty and interested in what you're doing if it's Pick a Brick stuff you're trying to sort out - no bad thing! Easiest thing for you to do will be to look up the part number (I don't have the instructions to hand but I'm sure the Emerald Night instructions will have a parts inventory at the back) and then have that handy when you call them, it'll make the call a lot easier - though if you end up having to describe the brick they'll definitely still be able to help you out. Usually only takes about a week from calling them for stuff to arrive too!

The thing I instantly thought of here are the cars at Legoland Windsor - in the Minitown area (or whatever they call it) they have plenty of vehicles running a set route around town - though I have no idea how they do it! You can see a few examples here:

Really nice setup, great to see some of the 12V working there - where did you get the blue inside power rail, I've never seen those before? Definitely looks like a huge amount of work but well worth it, great to see all those trains running at once!

That's the plight of the 12V fan I'm afraid - Ebay prices are high, bricklink prices aren't much better - I hope you don't want to get loads of signals as they're the worst offenders! In my experience, the train that's easiest to get hold of is 7745, as it was one of the best in terms of popularity and availability so plenty of people still have them to sell and are doing so, unlike the 7740 which is like gold dust and goes for a premium price every time. Also keep your eyes open for 12V motors and the old push trains/4.5V trains, as those trains tend to be less expensive and are easily converted (and fit in well with many of the 12V ones with a little modification to update designs) 12V points can go for variable prices, but if you're not too fussy you should be able to get the manual points for a good price, the remote control ones can get really expensive. I speak from experience having swelled my 12V collection quite significantly a few months ago, but good luck - keep looking on ebay at train auctions that don't have 12v in the title as they're more likely to be browsed over by most (not me!)