Winchester

It was reported a few hours ago that they were having problems with a fuel leak an that a scrub had been recommended hours before the launch window.

Decided to try building a double modular from an official set, and discovered that at some point in the recent past, Stud.io has added limits to the number of bricks you can use from a palette generated from an official set by default. I.e. if the official set only has one white 1x6 plate, then one white 1x6 plate is all you can pick from the palette and then it goes away. That, as far as I remember, didn't use to be the case last time I built an official set in Stud.io, and I'd very much like to revert to the old behavior of unlimited bricks, just from the limited selection. Anyone know how to do this? Edit: How did this end up in *this* thread, I was looking at a more general stud.io thread...

This review brings back such nostalgia. There may have been multiple released versions of this set, because it was on sale for a very long time in LEGO terms (eight years, as it wasn't replaced until 1988), and I got mine in 1987. I'm pretty sure I remember building mine with black pins (the friction kind) for most of the chassis, as opposed to the grey ones from the original release. I can't prove this anymore, since all my Lego and all the instruction scraps I still owned were given away twenty years ago.

I really liked the *idea* of 60051, it has sleek modern lines and everything you want in a modern high speed train... except due to Lego's format, it's way short. It's not just five cars short of a full train, the cars themselves are basically half their scale length. So I decided to fix it: Problem number one with the train set, if you want to use it to replicate an ICE-3 (which is what it's closest to looking like unmodded), is that the length of the cars are way short. So I fixed that, by using two 6x24 train baseplates for the end cars, and two 6x28 train baseplates for all the other cars. That netted me a length of about 58-59 studs per car, which is very close to 1/50 scale. It also gives more room to work with for an interior (which I haven't made yet). Problem number two with it is that the real train has really close connections between the cars, and 60051 as built has not just a 1 stud air gap, but the airlock thingies add another two studs to the total. This took a bunch of revision before I hit on a decent method, and I'm still not entirely satisfied with it. Basically I did away with the magnets entirely, and the actual coupling between the train cars is a 4x4 round plate that sits on a jumper on each train car, with another jumper on the same axis at the top connected to the roof of the train. In real life, it would probably be too stiff for use on an actual track, but it *will* bend, and it's the closest I've been able to manage at this point. But the result of it is that the connection between the cars is reduced to 1 stud in length, and there's no air gap at all. And problem number three was that there wasn't enough cars. The real train has eight cars - two end cars (one first, one second class), three regular passenger cars without a pantograph (one first, two second class); two passenger cars with a pantograph (one of each class); and the bistro car. I've so far made the end cars, the regular cars, and the pantograph-equipped ones, and the Bistro car is up next. But I also decided to have some fun and make the double-decker car that some of the older ICE trains had. It uses a brick-built base, so there's no edge "skirt" around the top of the boogies unlike the others, which is a thing I'd like to fix if I can, but I am fresh out of ideas for that...

I felt a little inspired, so I made some changes to the train to make it into a Eurostar train instead of an ICE - more color variation is always good, right? :) I've revised the window layout radically, as well as the roof of the train. The Eurostar, while being based on the same train as the ICE 3, is double the length - I haven't found references for all the car types yet, so I haven't built more than the first four though, and even the ones I have built aren't completely finished. This train is *definitely* a static display piece, because in order to get the doors into their proper locations, there's a bunch things that hang on only a single stud that would *not* agree with trying to go around any kind of bend. :)

Thanks for the feedback. Just to re-iterate though - this is meant as a scale model to match some of my other work, it's not meant as a practical "can go around a standard Lego track" play set. Getting it to look accurate was my primary consideration throughout the build - that's why the cars have their own boogies, and why I bothered designing the coupling method the way I did. I do use Jacobs boogies where it is appropriate to do so - it just wasn't for this particular train. (The Horizon express on the other hand... though not for the whole set, as the first three boogies at each end of the train are similar to these in real life). For some reason, I can't resist building everything ridiculously huge in LDD - I have a fire station that would fill half my living room if I built it in real life; with 20 different vehicles and a 3-story office-and-barracks building with conference rooms, a dispatch central, and a gymnasium; I've been working off and on for some time on a truck cargo terminal that looks like it's going to be just as monstrous in size; and if I ever build a train station don't expect it to fit in your average house...

I need those train fronts in LDD... :) Very nice dome car, I wish they'd sell the cars separately though.

I don't know how useful it would be for an actual motorized train, LDD says you can only get 11 and a bit degrees of bend out of the whole assembly and it will probably be quite stiff to bend in the first place, but I've made a close-up picture for you. Basically the bottom of the hinge is a 4x4 plate with two jumpers arranged as shown. The top of the hinge is two 2x2 round tiles with one stud, which hold the cylinder halves together; and which in turn are held in place by the center pin of the roof piece. The cylinder halves come in 2 brick and 5 brick heights, I used one of each basically because it fit rather perfectly once I had it together. It should be possible to modify the construction to provide a two-stud gap between the train cars, by putting the pivot points at the edges of the cylinder (use 2x1 jumpers at the top, and use a 2x1 plate to interface with the jumper at the bottom), which should give the train a whole lot more ability to bend - but it will still be kind of stiff due to the joints being jumper plates.

If you mean color variations (because the real trains are used in at least three different liveries that I can name off hand, and possibly a few more that I've forgotten about), then yes, I've already worked out how to do a few. Problem is, they're digital only, because that train front only exists in white. :( If you mean older versions of the same style, sure, now that I know how to do the coupling mechanism, there's nothing stopping me from doing something very similar with 7879, which looks very much like an older version of this anyway. I've also done an extended version of the Horizon Express, but it's not full length like this just yet, though it does have appropriate boogies (the real train has shared boogies between most of the cars, only the first and second cars from each end have non-shared boogies). Here's a set of rails with an overhead power transfer system I made a while back, working out how to do that was an interesting exercise to be sure. Also featured are the original 60051 and 7879 with some extra cars to make them longer. I've also done some work on rolling stock for cargo trains, here's a set of European-style trailer transport cars I made, easily converted into double-decker container carrier cars for full size freight containers (just add sides...) They actually fit under the same overhead lines as the other trains, at least with just trailers loaded. I have a US style flatbed car for trailer transport as well, but that doesn't work on electrified European railroads.

Ah thanks, I wasn't working from any kind of references for that, just a half remembered "didn't I see this somewhere?". It doesn't really belong on that train anyway, I just did it for fun to work out how. :) From the look of those profiles, ICE 1 would be a lot easier to do as a motorized train than ICE 3, not only are the motor cars just motor cars, they also have the extended boogies that look like the Lego train motors already. That saves a lot of trouble.

It's not meant for a standard Lego layout, those have problems even with the length of cars that Lego designs themselves. This is a scale model, meant for scale track layouts, with turn radii in the hundreds of studs. If I've done my math right, the full eight car train can bend somewhere around 80 degrees, maybe as much as 90 - in four meters of track. Which sounds about right compared to the real thing. Also, I didn't motorize it at all, so it's basically a static model.

After some fits and starts with figuring out the render process and the like, I'm finally ready to post some of my work. Let's start with something kind of plain, and see where it goes: LXF File This is a full-length European-style truck and dolly/trailer combination, based heavily on the "LEGO City Scania Truck Instructions" video by "custombricksets" (the front of the cab mainly), and the official 3221 Delivery Truck set for the trailer, but with my own flair on it (three axles and a ball socket at the back so you can connect another dolly if you want), and the truck has a ramp that's based on a MOC by Are Helseldal I found on LEGO Ideas. It's built to a 1 stud = 40 cm scale, which works out to six studs wide, and 62.5 studs long for a 2.5 x 25 meter truck, which is pretty much spot on. The truck is around 28 studs long, the trailer is 33, and there's 1.5 studs of room between the ramp and the trailer.

Work on the truck stop continues: Click the link for a bigger image. This is based on the biggest truck stop in my home town, currently a Circle K (formerly a Statoil station). It's not the most spectacular location in the world, but it has three diesel pumps for trucks, four multifunction pumps for cars, bathrooms, trailer- and van rental, a car wash, etc. I've done it up in Octan colors because they're easy to remember. I haven't gotten started on the interior just yet, except for blocking out the rooms etc, will need to study more official sets and things before I get cracking on that.

Time for a bit of a WIP: This is the business end of a truck stop I've started working on, to give my trucks somewhere to refuel. It's modular in construction (not quite in the same way as the modular buildings are though), and built in sections that are six (basically the pump sections), ten (the roof inbetween the pumps), and two (the end sections) studs wide, allowing extension to the kind of massive ten- or twelve bay (or bigger!) truck stop fueling stations I found when I was looking for inspiration. It is of course done up in the "Octan Energy" color scheme, and uses modified gas pumps from LEGO's official 60016 Tanker truck - I shortened the pump to fit on a 2x4 by removing the refilling cap thingy, changed the attachment of the refueling handle, and added some color to the top to indicate natural gas (blue) and diesel (yellow). It looks from some of the pics I've found online that I should change the yellow to green though. I'll make another version for regular cars which has a gasoline pump later, I think. Maybe a three-mode where I use one yellow, one green and one blue brick at the top? After that I will of course have to make a decent-sized main building for this, with a convenience store at one end, and an eatery at the other, Anyway, now that I've made the *easy* part, does anyone have any suggestions? An LXF for what I've built so far is available on request, didn't want to upload the unfinished version unnecessarily.

Finally got back to actually playing with this again, I was running on a too small CPU fan for a while and it wouldn't have been a good idea to try and render anything until I got a decent one installed. As a warm-up I started building up some official LEGO City semi-trucks to get a feel for how they go together, which went fine until I got to the recent Mobile Command Center truck, 60139. The tractor unit from that is so short it kind of breaks the rules on how semi-tractors are put together to allow full articulation of the trailer, and if you try to use a different trailer on it, you're kind of stuck. So I rebuilt it: LXF file All I've really done to it is stretch it two studs, then moved the rear axles half a stud forward again by replacing the 1 x 4 axle units with 2x2 parts. And added rear lights, because the original set was missing those. Personally, I think this looks like it's supposed to be a Scania T-series - an earlier model of it from before they started slanting the hood so much.

That traffic police car makes me think of a 50s or 60s Yellow Cab, but it's a little too short to easily modify for seating a figure in the back. :( Five-wide is an interesting scale though. A lot more difficult to build than the standard 4- and 6-wide, I sometimes look at these things and wonder how many of the studs in there are actually facing upwards in proportion to the other directions...

I can hear the theme song playing as I look at that... Good job!

I'm not sure whether to post the LXF file for this, as it's another MOD based really heavily on work by custombricksets: Basically, I built a lowboy trailer based on Smigol's from Flickr, which was excellent (not entirely 100% buildable in LDD, but close enough), and then tried attaching it to custombricksets' Scania Heavy Load Truck that he posted to his Youtube channel a couple of months back. Except it wouldn't fit - custombricksets had put the fifth wheel two studs too far forward, and it was two plates too high as well. So I rebuilt the entire back end of the vehicle, including converting it from 2 + 2 axles (which I couldn't find real life pics of) to 1+3 axles (much easier to find), and lowering it the two required plates. And fitting in a 2 x 2 round plate under the round tile so that the hook fits properly. I'll probably wait to post the LXF until I've built my own cab for it as well and made it completely mine, but I figure a picture should be OK to post.

I've been working on building 6-wide trucks in LDD since rediscovered the joy of LEGO again, but I'm rapidly running out of patience for the limitations of that scale (namely, you can have nice looking wheels or structural stability, but not both) so I thought I'd turn to the old Model Team sets for inspiration instead. Lots easier to build 12 or 14-wide, right? Except there's a major snag in that none of the old classic Model Team sets are buildable in LDD due to using the old Technic Plates with rounded ends and holes in them instead of the Technic Half Beams, and all the MOCs I can find instructions for are radio controlled, which I'm not all that interested in and which are a pain in the neck to build in LDD. I'm satisfied with a nice display piece which I can modify to show various truck configurations. Can anyone point me in the direction of a nice and easy MOC or official LEGO set I can use to as a base for some mostly static builds in 12-14 wide using the Model Team wheels, so I can get some idea of how steering and stuff fits together now?

I'm well aware of Extended Mode, I just only use it when I'm forced to because I need something that I know exists in real life but that isn't available in normal mode. Like the 2x2 turntables and such. It really helps make sure that my models are actually buildable in real life, because the Extended Mode would let you do stuff like build the whole model in weird colors which have ridiculously limited parts selection in real life. Also, I tend to use the "filter by color" tool instead of painting with the bucket most of the time. I'm currently working on a cargo handling facility to dock my trailers at, which is looking promising. I just have to stop trying to make them in realistic scale, because 8 trailer docks x 10 studs wide (the trucks are 9 wide over the mirrors) = an 80-stud wide building...

Thank you! Working on some less plain trailers at the moment, attempting to use various techniques I found for making containers. Also trying to restrict myself to bricks that actually exist, which makes things difficult since LDD doesn't have a complete color table for some parts. I also need to work on some more truck cabs... In the mean time, have a fire engine (clickable image this time): LXF File This is entirely a MOC from one end to the other, a Swedish Scania P-series fire truck as used by my local fire department. In Sweden, the national organizations for fire fighters and for municipalities got together decades ago to bash out some standard layouts for fire engines, which today are known as the BAS system. This in particular is either a BAS 1 or BAS 3, the difference is whether all the wheels are powered or not. I'm not entirely happy with this as it stands, the equipment locker proportions are way off (it should essentially be a six-wide in front of the axle, and a three-wide behind it, but those frames and shutter pieces only come in one with and it would have looked way too short if I only used one locker in front of the axle). Also, the most recent versions of these have the ladders in encapsulated bins on top which slide over the rear edge and hinge down for access, which I couldn't replicate in this scale. But at least it looks more like a real fire engine than the official stuff... :) Oh, and since fire departments in Sweden tend to pick one supplier of the automotive components and then stick to them for their entire fleet of heavy vehicles, I ended up getting a lot of mileage out of that cabin. I'll share some more of those later.

I'm trying to work out the "proper" length scale for my various 6-wide trucks and trailers to make sure they look realistically proportioned, and after talking to my dad (who is a retired long-haul trucker) and looking at the actual regs for truck myself, it turns out that European trucks are actually built from modules to make it easier to satisfy all the rules - and these rules are built around 80 x 120 cm cargo pallets, that will fit either two or three in width inside the cargo box. My immediate thought was that if you then go by exterior scale only, and assume the real trucks have negligible thickness of the walls, you can basically use 2 x 3 tiles to represent the cargo pallets, and determine the length in studs fairly simply by counting the number of pallets that fits. In Europe, the standard modules are 7.2 meters (for 18 pallets), which translates to 6 x 18 studs; and 13.6 meters (for 33 pallets), which translates to 33 studs. The entire vehicle including all trailers is normally limited to 25.25 meters, which is 63.125 studs. Basically, it has to fit on two 32 x 32 baseplates, and it's road legal in the EU. In Canada, they allow trailers up to 16.2 meters, which is 40.5 studs - I'd call it 40, easier to work with as that's two 6 x 16 and one 6 x 8 plate, and a 23 meter total vehicle length restriction (57.5 studs). The US regs are confusing, because all the ones I can find are for *minimum* lengths. A single trailer has a federal minimum length of 48 feet, which translates to 36 studs; some states have old trailers that conform to longer form factors (up to 59 feet, which would be 40 studs!) They also have a minimum length of 28 feet (21 studs) per trailer in a multi-trailer rig. And of course there are the exceptions, for when your cargo doesn't fit in neat packages. All of this assumes that you're comfortable with minifig-scale fudging, by the way - once you put siding on your trailer there's no way to actually stick that many 2 x 3 tiles in there... (Now, to rebuild my truck MOCs to fit the correct lengths...)

Thanks for the reply! Nice to know you guys actually have a tag for that, it's been so long since I looked up the glossary I'd forgotten there was a MOD tag too. I know what you mean about inspiration - I've been looking at official instructions and modding them to suit my needs because why reinvent the wheel? Also, speaking of trucks, I found an official set (3321 Delivery Truck) that hadn't been built in LDD for some reason, but apparently I need a Brickshelf account to post it, and of course it's giving a server error when I try to register for one. :( Update: Of course I wasn't finding the set in the list, I had the wrong number. It's 3221, not 3321. And it's been done twice and better than mine, so no point posting it again... :(

Hi! I'm Winchester, and I've been building Lego off and on since the 80s, until I gave away most of my collection (it wasn't that huge) to a daycare center for lack of space (and lack of enough parts to actually build anything decent) back in 2000-ish. Recently I'm starting to get back into the hobby though through digital means - Lego on the computer has the distinct advantage of me not being able to lose pieces to the carpet monster or vacuum cleaner, and I'll never have to be afraid of stepping on a brick again. I tell myself that every time I start missing the feel of physical bricks... :) I'm currently building a lot of trucks and fire engines and things - one of my neighbors is a former fire fighter, and my father is a retired long-haul trucker, which helps fuel my interest. I'd love to post some of my MOCs, but I'm not sure what the local definition of plagiarism is (basically, will I get hammered if I post the truck-dolly-trailer rig I just made because is uses the cab of a rather recognizable semi-tractor MOC I found online?) plus I can't really make instruction videos like the people I've been cribbing from do.... :)