Mr Benn

I don't know quite how newsworthy this is, but I found the tan Creator house (6754) which I'd given up finding in stores since it's clearly been discontinued, in Toys R Us in Luton for £59.99 today - they had plenty of them in stock, even though it's no longer listed on the Lego Shop @ Home site anymore. Also a bunch of the Prince of Persia sets were on sale with about 25% off which seemed pretty good :)

Hi all - long-time lurker but newbie poster here! I have been looking at some of the amazing towns that people have built on here, and I was wondering one main thing - what is the best way to make your towns 'multi-level'? I have seen some brilliant MOC dioramas (especially for the shows) where people have built hills and things, and also elevated train lines, but for the most part people's towns seem to be quite flat. I don't have thousands and thousands of pieces to build my own slopes with - I was wondering if anyone has ideas/photos/experience of relatively simple ways to add more levels - even just an elevation of 10cm or so - and have the levels joined reasonably seamlessly together?

Has anyone else noticed the tiny difference between the photos of the house and the instructions? The box art has flowers on the front of the top storey of the brown house, whereas there's nothing for this in the instructions - but fortunately they give you all the parts you need to correct the error in the box :)

In WH Smith in Camberley (where I work) they've always had loads of the sets, late into the afternoon - I talked to one of the cashiers and she said they had a huge run on them every day early in the morning but there were still plenty left at 5pm - I have a sneaky suspicion that the staff have all gone home with plenty! Was at Toys R Us though in Watford later on today and she said they were sold out by lunchtime and it had just been crazy - am pleased to have least gotten a few of the sets I wanted though - would quite like the AT-ST tomorrow (given that it's a set that's been an official retail set, I already have two of those from ages ago!) but not sure I can be bothered to get up - tomorrow is my trip to the Lego store to buy the Pet Shop anyway so I'll get a good dose of Lego for the day! :) :)

Well I can certainly see what's in it for TRU - it was PACKED this morning first thing with parents and all of their children clutrhing the little Jack Sparrow bag - it's an excellent advertisement for Lego for the POTC sets. TRU were restricting the number of coupons they'd honour (they did 2 for me), buyt WH Smith were basically of the opinion that if you buy a paper you get one kit per paper - they're making money on it I guess whilst TRU aren't. No problem in Watford today - went in this morning, bought a couple of copies of the fabulous News of the World (did anyone see the excellent 'story' starring Philip Schofield on the very next page?' and got a couple as soon as I bought them, ripped some vouchers out and traded them in at TRU, and then went back at the end of today (about 4pm) with the rest of my vouchers and they were happy to change them for more sets. Sweet :) Though this is going to be the only day I can do this, except maybe Friday (which is good, as the PQ set is the only other one I'd want :)

Sometimes it's really good to incorporate parts of the old set into the new ones - as a lot of the city buildings are quite 'modular' - i.e. several distinct sections to the buildings - sometimes it's just a case of getting some bigger baseplates and positioning a few different sections side by side or on top of each other, depending on how well it works out - works pretty well for many of the police and fire stations though as they have relatively similar colours... 6332 seems a totally different colour, but has cool green windows (not sure I've seen this set before, must have been in a dark age of mine!) - I would repurpose those windows and some of the structure into some distinctly shadier security force building, that mysterious one on the edge of town where no one really knows what goes on in there - might be quite handy in this new age of the alien invasion!!

I love this layout - am really impressed by the multi-levelness of it all - is it really (as it seems) all supported by Lego or have you done anything else to steady the structure? Am wanting to do my own multi-level town due to space issues (so that I can display stuff like the modular buildings at the same time as having some trains running) though may have to build some wooden substructure for the whole thing.. Also, I'd love to be able to see 'inside' the first layer before the second layer went on top, to see how much room is inside your tunnels - do you have any pics like this? Am really liking your big green hill slopes, that's a ridiculous amount of green bricks you have there ;-)

Loving the barbershop, looks great with the tiled flooring and the exterior! The interior of the nightclub is great too - wondering if you couldn't design a rooftop area for your club too for your legotown denizens to chill out in - after all, I hear that smoking is banned inside all clubs in legoland too but statistically some of the little guys are bound to be smokers after all ;-)

Brilliant van, but favourite part of it all is definitely the robot. You need to have one of the guys with a little remote control unit for it, so he can stay at a nicely safe distance... either that or a trailer on your truck with a little control 'office' in it with control panels and displays and such :)

I'd love to see these buildings alongside some of the other period buildings such as Medieval Market village - as a contrast to my nice and new Mular Building street, I'd also love to make a small 'old town' area, with ye olde buildings like this and narrow alleyways for streets, just for a bit of atmosphere - will probably be where all the tourists go so might have to convert at least one of the buildings to a terrible souvenir shop ;-)

Where did Roger get all of his money from in the first place? He should have invested in some nicer clothes to go with his new train :p

I is BEST FRIENDZ wit Hello Kitteh! Looky!

Well I spotted these in Sainsburys this morning, so having bought a few bags there walked into town - found the new boxes in a local toy emporium, luckily they said it was ok to buy a sealed box (hurray!) So, out of a box of 59, I got two full sets (just short one surfer girl)... the artist, scientist and footballers seems to be really very common, I have enough sailors to man a small cruiser, and (in my experience) the musketeers, female ice dancers, viking chaps and gnomes I only got three of. SO I'm really quite pleased, having not got a box of series 3 but spent ages squinting at silly hard to see dots in the stores... As well as on here there is a nice guide to figures here along with a dot decoder - I have to say that I found reading the dots on the orange packages far more difficult than the green ones of series 3...

Great review - love to see this train on a great layout! This was my first ever lego train - got it back in about 1984 - loved 12V ever since! Since we're moving soon I found all of the boxes the other day and wanted to test everything for the first time in over 10 years - my wife wasn't very pleased to come home to find this in the living room! 12V trains