Tube Map Central

Sorry folks, but traffic on this forum has declined so much that it really isn't worth posting any more, and I can't see any evidence that there is any likelihood that attempts will be made to try and bring people back. I have seen so many talented intelligent people fade away in the last year and I guess that the rot will continue until the posts-per-day on EB drop into single digits, then the site will shut down for good. Thanks for the positive comments to my previous posts, and please don't reply to this topic or message me on this site because I genuinely won't be reading it. If you want to contact me, there are enough clues in what I have written elsewhere for you to find me directly. All the best for future MOCing Max

Here it is ... Open saloon motor coach designed/in progress It's just about possible with just enough height for luggage racks. The difficulty is that top-hung brackets are needed for smooth sides but these intrude a lot into the passenger space. You might turn them into tables, but this is a city train and I wanted to give the impression of high density seating. The floor is raised and there are limited opportunities for fixing the sides. Even so, it seems to be staying together. http://www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/tm5.JPG http://www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/tm6.JPG

Thanks to everyone for kind words ... I really look forward to that! Liked this one on Ideas a lot. https://ideas.lego.com/projects/3e044455-d651-4022-b78f-9eaadff9abab Would love to see a Lego competition: build a Moc in which one of our production parts isn't available in a colour you need. First prize would be the part specially recoloured. Not saying I would win, but I would definitely enter.

One more observation, this method works well for a compartment coach, but there is too much intrusion into the saloon for an open coach to work. I can't see a way round that unless there is an obscure part that I'm missing. On second thoughts, I think I've worked it out, watch this space ...

Go for it! There are some really nice MOCs out there, but the humble EMU needs more Lego representation. While everyone was getting excited by these things ... I was travelling on these ... and enjoying every minute, they were really comfortable and made great sounds ... Thanks! That's really inspired me, I have been really busy lately and there are lots of photographs That I need to take. My MOC beginnings were a very humble Bricklinked MOD of 4554, changing some construction because parts were too rare/expensive. I'm not particularly skilled at the clever building techniques in Lego, I just put parts together from my oddments crate until I get lucky!

Re non-displaying photos. This seems to be a home router issue, possibly something to do with a firewall but restarting the router sometimes helps. For some reason all the direct links were wrong but I've fixed them now. Hard work, the Eurobricks editor hates iOS

In the end, I gave up with this idea. Partly because the row of studs was very intrusive, but also because the brackets I needed are only available in a limited range of colours. So I tried something along the same lines but different, with top-hung brackets. This intrudes into the passenger compartment but I was able to build it into the seats fully, so that there is nothing suspicious apart from the red lining on the outside, which is broken up for some reason. The result is a weaker structure - by my standards - but you can still pick it up and shake it and nothing will fall off/out/in. So this looks the part, and my Edwardian EMUs will get a new post soon ... Very very strong but it didn't look great www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/tm1.JPG Now with top-hung brackets (front) www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/tm2.JPG Now with top-hung brackets (rear). The structural integrity relies on half-studded plates/tiles www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/tm3.JPG But the outcome is surprisingly strong www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/tm4.JPG

This is a little bit crazy, and unfinished, but it's still worth showing ... Most electrified railway networks in the first half of the 20th century ran on direct current but received alternating current from power stations. Initially this was converted to DC using rotary convertors (also known as motor generators). With moving parts, these were relatively high maintenance, and many of them were replaced with mercury arc rectifiers, the most beautiful electronic devices ever created. I wanted to try to get the shape and effect of these in Lego, the challenge is modelling the complex glasswork, especially SNOT connections. I'm now hoping that one day TLG will produce balloon panels in trans-clear so that I can finish this! The end result is way too tall. If the two-high cylinder panels ever appear in trans-clear I can drop the height by three bricks. Even then this massive structure dwarfs the minifigures, but that adds to the mad-scientist effect of the original. I couldn't resist adding the decorative centrepiece to the top. The geometry is slightly off but it's only noticeable on close inspection and the structure is strong overall. www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/MAR1.jpg www.tubemapcentral.com/legodesign/eurobricks/MAR2.jpg

Well, no, it might work for you but you are not everyone else, and everyone else is giving up Eurobricks. Try to find reasons for this rather than dismissing complaints as trivial/worthless. I was alluding to this on my OP. I want to take a photo on my device and post on Eurobricks, no hassle, no signing away my personal data to a free-for-now social media website that can change its rules at a moments notice. How many dead photos on old posts on EB with no chance of ever seeing them again? If EB can't accommodate this then I will be gone like everyone else soon enough, and then there will be no one left for you to be patronising to.

Late to the party, but so what ... Eurobricks is dying, that much is obvious. The traffic has dropped noticeably in the last eighteen months. I keep reading responses to suggestions such as this one above along the lines of "Eurobricks doesn't do that" and "Eurobricks isn't an X website". Well sorry, but your forum is dying, so however Eurobricks is doing it might be the wrong way. Complacency like this might be dangerous. Yes please. I want a like button. As an occasional poster of MOCs I would never consider a like to be a low-energy cop-out. I'm just delighted that people took the time to pause and express pleasure. Indeed, wading through all those (diminishing) "very nice, well done" comments gets repetitive after a while. I'm really looking for suggestions for improvement, constructive criticism, or something that makes me smile. And while I am here, what else? ... 1) Host images. This is the 21st century. The cloud exists. Images can be auto-trimmed down. Twitter does it. Most image hosting websites permit likes and comments, so why go through all the performance of reposting images to dying-forum, low-traffic Eurobricks? Where is the added value when you can get plenty of feedback from thriving sites that are now effectively rivals? 2) Fix those editing 'tools'. I am sure that having supposedly helpful editing tools is well-intentioned, but the reality is that my iPad gets into a terrible fight with them. It's almost impossible to compose a post on notes and paste it in. It doesn't make sense to have a desktop-friendly tablet-hostile website any more. 3) Wake up the mods. I've used messaging to try and contact them about, for example, which forum is most appropriate for a post. Never got a reply. 4) Permit discussion of non-law-breaking clones. The name of this forum is EuroBRICKS not EuroTLG. Yes, I hear that this forum has some sort of special status with TLG, well not much point of that if the forum is dying. Clones exist, and they do some stuff that TLG does not. If TLG products really are superior then there is nothing to fear. Show up non-TLG products for what they are. 5) Impossible to fix, but will say this anyway. The cultists are driving people away. I swear that if some of these people found that TLG was grinding up babies to colour their bricks, they would still spring to TLG defence. Hard to decide what is the more tedious, the aggressive "TLG is cleverer than you and knows everything so shut up" ones, or the passive-aggressive long responses that go on and on and on. Yes, this post is long, but at least I broke it up into bullet points.

Thread bumping time ... I am reworking these models, and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for the following. On Car No 1 (the one with compartments) the cabling for the compartment lights, as per many British prototypes, is on the roof. I represented the cables with (cut) antenna, but I have never been happy with the lamp holders, the Technic parts are too clumsy even for Lego. They need to accept/hold the cables and look as though they are drilled through the roof and holding the lights, something circular preferred Bricks with side studs are too square and stick out too much). Thoughts appreciated.

If road plates go down on a hard flat surface and stay there then they should stay together, but any movement and the current method of joining them is fragile, especially if tiles are used. It's the same as joining any two plates, one plate on top is brittle, you need one plate on top and one underneath the joint to splice them. With only a connection on top, the road plates move with a destructive effect on the connection. The road plates are two plates high and the current design doesn't give much space to play with, but there is room along the long edge to make an indentation so that a 2x4 plate can add an under-connection without raising the height. Not perfect, but it might help a little?

No, it is objectively a rubbish miserable shed, you are just seeing it through your rose tinted Lego worship glasses

Wouldn't that be the marketing point if TLG were sincere and wanted to encourage train travel? Look at the train, it can take you to wherever you to go, look at the station, isn't it exciting, it's almost a cathedral, just think of the possibilities! Instead we get, "here is the station, it's a miserable shed but it is at least clean, now stop asking questions: I am detecting cynicism as well as laziness now ...

4554, according to Bricklink, has 555 parts, we are hardly talking bank-busting stuff here. It's not a grand terminus in European terms, it is a town station or a substantial commuter station. Since when did Lego have to be AUTHENTIC?! It's a toy, it is supposed to be inspirational and aspirational, not crush children's spirit with the grim realities that when they travel be train the best they can hope for is a miserable shed. What happened to the excitement and romance of travel? Clacton-on-Sea, population 60,000. This is our station. The town has problems, and the station has seen better days, but we hang on, and it is most certainly not a miserable shed. This is UK authentic, we have good railway stations here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacton-on-Sea_railway_station#/media/File%3A2013_at_Clacton-on-Sea_-_station_frontage.jpg Not especially, I'm a UX researcher and Apple stuff is garbage compared with 20 years ago. They care more about the coolness of features than whether people can actually make use of them. I should know, I bought my first Mac in 1990.