English Electric

I have two motors under each power car of a 10-car Horizon Express. I opened the motors up and swapped the wires over on one bogie for each power car to remove the need to have a polarity switch.

For info, the Intercity 125 coaching stock is not sliding door, they are slam door stock with central locking. Fantastic model by the way, you've captured the look perfectly! It would look awesome with a few more carriages!

I can vouch for the quality of decals produced by JopieK, they really are as good as Lego produced decals, and Johan will do custom stickers. I had him produce the TGV sets for the Horizon Express and they look great, I believe they are on general sale in his website now.

One of the main reasons I would rather use the AAA battery packs is that they are effectively better 'future proofed' than the rechargeable packs. In 20 years time will the rechargeable packs still be going strong, or will they have died by then? At least with the AAA packs when the rechargeable batteries have past their best they can simply be exchanged at little cost.

After reading this thread in August I went online and bought 60 eneloop AAA batteries, I have to say I'm very impressed with them. On the website I bought from there were bundle deals where you could buy the genuine eneloop charger complete with 4 batteries for only a small amount more than just buying the batteries, so I got a couple of the chargers and them seem to work well

My sons main lego interest is usually lego trains, and he asked me to make him a truck for towing trains around on, here is the LDD result, I'm pretty happy with it and am now being pestered to get the bricks to build it! Let me know what you think... Dave

Sorry for rambling on, I took a good look at the truck tonight and decided it needed re-doing, I decided to base it on this Heanor unit:

Cab now shortened back by one stud, I'm happier with the look. I've also re-addressed the exhaust to make it less basic, and deleted the second exhaust in lieu of fitting an engine air intake...

Thanks for the feedback, I see what you mean with the cab depth, I will have a look to see if I can improve it. As for loco width, the gauge profile in the UK is fairly small so I don't think width difference would look too bad, here is a UK class 47 on a 12 axle trailer, it's actually narrower than the trailer. This is 12 axles long, I went for 9 as it will I think suit Lego loco lengths better.

The reason the trailer has so many axles is due to the load being carried. Even UK locos (small by worldwide standards) can weigh in excess of 130 tonnes. Here is an example similar to my design but with a shorter trailer for a smaller load... Here's one with a 9 axle trailer... Ultimately they are configurable to load length, weight, etc...

Ok,had a total re-design of the trailer, and several mods to the truck. The aux engine to run the trailer is now part of the trailer, and there is a long range fuel tank mounted behind the cab. The trailer wheels I realised were too big compared to the truck, and made the loco area high, hence the total re-make. I also corrected an error on the truck where the front panel was sitting too low leaving a gap under the windscreens, see what you reckon...

Thanks for the comments, I've done a fair few alterations today, but still a work in progress. I will look at the cost of building through the week!...

Does it go all the way through, could it be to stop children choking on it if it was swallowed?

Correct, all older UK 3rd rail loco's have long since been withdrawn from service/scrapped. There used to be class 70 and 71 which were straight 3rd rail electric loco's, and some 71's were rebuilt as Electro-diesels, being reclassified as class 74. Of these I think only one class 71 is preserved. On the subject of yellow loco's, this is the chosen colour for all of Network Rail's loco fleet (UK rail infrastructure owner).

I will build the two extra engines and I am going to fit TGV decals to all four engines, one pair with the earlier TGV logos and one with the later ones... Here is the basic train in 1+8+1 (with a few minor bits missing that my son has got "somewhere"!), I have ordered all the parts for the roof, skirt and bogie mods so await their arrival!

That would be interesting to try, one step at a time for now though! The two sets came today, two carriages now built and two to go, I will have to order some parts to make three more Jacobs bogies plus two modified roofs and six modified underframe skirts!!!

I would say the HE has probably been a success, I got two when it came out, but I have just bought another two to make up a full rake of 1+8+1, not sure if two motors will be enough or if we've got enough track!!!

This is superb! I travelled on the Railjet from Salzburg to Vienna earlier in the year with work and have to say its a fantastic smooth service, you have captured it just about as perfectly as you could do!

The UK national railway museums in York and Shildon are great attractions with exhibits of hugely significant historical importance, plus the museums are both free to enter... And after all, it all stated here in the UK..... :) co-incidentally I have been to the York one today whilst 'at work' !!! http://www.nrm.org.uk

You could try the solvent type nail polish remover, that may well shift the printed details on the road boards

Excellent work, makes me want to try and create a USP5000RT using a few of your methods!

Well I thought I would post the results of my efforts today, nothing special but my son decided to get the monster fighters ghost train set with some of his Christmas money, and after he finished building it this morning he instantly said to me "can we add power functions daddy?" So here is the result, the other side isn't complete yet as I didn't have enough parts, I also had to raise the front by one flat so that the flangeless driving wheel didn't derail the train on the exit from bends, can't find a better solution for that yet! Let me know what you think! Cheers, Dave

The carriages are very nice Murdoch17, very representative of GWR appearance. The loco however needs a fair bit of work to make it look more GWR inspired, for example they only ever built one 4-6-2 loco, their favoured wheel arrangement for passenger loco's was 4-6-0. Also, they largely used belpaire fireboxes rather than round top/tapered fireboxes, and safety valves were usually mid boiler in a distinctive flat topped brass bonnet. GWR also didn't tend to use smoke deflectors.

I assume this means shunters that work as master and slave. There were three in the UK like this designated as British Rail class 13. They wer basically a pair of permanently coupled class 08 shunters one of which had its cab removed:

And yet when you go into shop 'by category' they are still using the image of 3677 on the trains button: