Commander Wolf

Dunno if anyone is interested in this sorta thing, but some commentary on drive train revisions on older MOCs... been doing a lot of this sort of thing in the last year. A lot of times when I do a new build, I don't know what the issues are until I run the engine more often and for long periods of time, and only then can you even start to debug or make improvements. Building a new powered tender for the T1 Changing the gear ratios and motors on the QJ Have a nice day!

That would be too easy

That is indeed my T1! ... it's roughly the same scale. You can see the original thread from 2014, though it has been updated a bunch since then!

I do have the unicycling lion... I think? At least this was what I saw on someone's model... though whether or not that model was accurate, I'm not sure I don't want to mod the 4.5v battery box car, so point to point will probably have to be for a future (smaller) model, but it is still on my bucket list! This one will probably get converted to PF (or maybe powered up!). One thing you can do with the 4.5v motors is wire them in series and then run them as pairs off the PF controller via the 9v extender/adapter. That's probably what I'm going to do if I want to keep the 4.5v motors in this loco, but they need a lot of gearing down and so far I haven't found the space to fit the PF battery box and receiver without compromising structural integrity. I'll definitely update the thread if I get around to it though.

Hello all, long time no post! This project is kind of a wash at this point, but I think it is still worth a share. Perhaps that's appropriate as the SR/Bulleid Leader is best known for being a total flop, an unconventional design with a lot of new features that of course proved too complicated and unreliable to even see regular service. Five of the 0-6-0 + 0-6-0 articulated locomotives were laid down, but only one was completed, tested, and deemed unsatisfactory before the whole lot was scrapped. I usually only build American trains, but I make exception for the Leader as I have a fondness "advanced steam" designs like the ACE 3000 and the 5AT. Also like the 5AT, I had built a mediocre model of the Leader a long time ago and wanted to revisit it... Like almost all of my train models, the Leader is built at roughly 1:48 scale, and the chassis can navigate all the normal LEGO R40 track geometries. At this scale the locomotive should really be 7-wide (as should most British engines), but I fudged it and made it 8-wide such that the body would not be wider than the trucks, which I could not narrow due to the huge greebles on their outside frames. Also due to the trucks I had to compromise on the lower line of the body: the prototype has a very long sweeping curve over the two inner drivers, but I could not get enough clearance between the wheels and the cowling to make this work on R40 curves, even with the pivots right next to the center axles. For now that line is just abbreviated, which is sad. The roof has a bit of a hodgepodge of different curves. The 2x8xN bow is a good approximation of the actual look, but I had to use other combinations of parts to model the various features on the top of the loco. I think the mix of implementations does a good job defining the shape but also giving it some texture, though there are some cracks especially around the bunker that possibly could be smaller. Moving on to the internals! This model has a pretty unique drivetrain and this was one of the main reasons I wanted to build it: when I bought a used 7722 a few years ago, I noted that the 4.5v system had a feature that has never appeared again on any subsequent train system, and that is the ability to run a train point to point** I thought it would be really cool to build a nice model that could leverage this functionality, but it would have to be a locomotive that could realistically pair with the two-axle 4.5v battery box, so revisiting the Leader seemed like a good choice. Furthermore, I wanted to try out an interesting articulation mechanism for the Leader proposed by fellow builder @jtlan, which would theoretically work well with the large outside frame greebles. Unfortunately it's this 4.5v drivetrain that really hasn't worked well. It seemed to work fine in the ample testing I did prior to finishing the model, but the shell turned out to be really heavy, and the motors have trouble moving it at a meaningful speed while pulling a meaningful train. You can see some of the test beds and the final product in this short video: Ultimately, I've tried to tweak it to no avail, so this will probably have to be converted to PF for it to work well, and I don't really have that much motivation to do that as 4.5v was the whole point. So for now, that's that; there are a few more pics once the Brickshelf folder is moderated, but otherwise have a nice day! ** What I mean by point to point is in the video at 0:10

Yeah, I'm aware of the previous posts... someone contacted me trying to get the file, but I don't have the original anymore, so I was hoping to be able to get someone to recover it from that post. If that's not possible, oh well.

I figure this is probably more appropriate for a DM, but I don't know who to contact. I'm trying to download an old attachment from this post: But everytime I try to save it, it comes up as an empty file. Would it be possible for an admin or mod to recover it for me or is it lost forever? Thanks!

Just wanted to share some pictures of the finished model. Was generally quite happy how it turned out: All the turrets and such can rotate: And as shown previously it can be displayed as a waterline model: Couple more pics in the Brickshelf folder once moderated. Cheers!

... and here's one of them: ACE 3000 PF Tender When I built my ACE 3000 model in 2013, I had very little experience with Power Functions and chose to power it the traditional way: pushing or pulling it with a 9v power car. Fast forward a few years and we are using 9v less and less and I thought it was time to do a PF conversion! I knew exactly what drivetrain I wanted to build too: between then and now I built a PF baggage car with XL motors, but due to various limitations, I was never really able to unleash the full power of the XL motors. Even with a mild up-gearing (2:1), it had way too much torque and not enough speed. I had been looking for an opportunity to better utilize the XL motors, and the huge size of the ACE tender made it the perfect application. That being said, it wasn't actually that easy to fit everything that I wanted into the conversion. Problem number one is that while the ACE tender does have a ton of space, a lot of it turns out to be not that useful due to the positioning of the bogies. There is literally no way to place the two motors anywhere but where they currently are, and thus any structural construction that went through those spaces before have to be rerouted. It's especially true in the front where there just aren't as many studs as I'd like holding the whole mess together, especially since the top needs to come off to change the batteries. Problem number two is the three-axle truck. There's been quite a few three-axle truck designs thrown around, but I was adamant about using the frames for structural integrity since there would be a lot of torque going through the trucks. In addition to using the frames and accomodating the sliding axle, the truck also needs to support a gearing-up stage because there isn't enough room to fit it in the body! The extra up-gearing is of course important to being able to tap more of the high power output of the XL motors, which is the whole point of this build. These trucks are admittedly not a very elegant construction and they actually extend pretty far into the body, but they are as strong as I'd have hoped and it's one way to use up all that space that I have! You'll notice that the center axle has two degrees of freedom: it can slide side to side and pivot (very very slightly) up and down due to the triangle only being pinned on one side. This very small amount of play combined with the fact that the center axle doesn't have a tire allows the bogies to not lose traction on the outer axles while going over uneven track. Here's a pic of the mechanical side of the thing. The frame here is designed such that the battery box pushes the motors down and the weight of the assembly rather than friction on an axle keeps the gears meshed. There is practically no change to the external appearance of the tender except for the trucks, which use my new favorite bogie-frame element, the 1x4 plate with two studs. The locomotive side has also been tweaked a little since 2013: at some point I cleaned up some of the strange construction in the chassis and some of the greebles attached to it. This was mainly a fix for reliability: the chassis needed to have some more play built-in such that it wouldn't derail over uneven track (there's a theme going on here), but hopefully it's a cleaner mechanical and aesthetic design as well. Everything together, and of course a video: 0:00 gears and such 0:24 low speed 1:00 top speed 1:24 NMRA train show

Ha ha, not what I was expecting at all. Cute!

Finally had the chance to stitch together more clips of the cars... this time with the side-dump car as well Bonus video with clips from BayLUG's annual Christmas show (does have the older two cars again though!)

Hello from the WoWS forums!

When I first built it, I also thought the caboose looked very short, but looking at the model versus the drawing, I'm fairly convinced that it's the angles at which we typically look at the model versus the angles at which we look at the prototypes. I'll admit it's still a little odd. That being said, the caboose is fairly short in general, with a roof height of 12' versus 15' for many locomotives. Yeah, I'm gonna try to shoot a little bit more video with all the cars together. Soon(TM).

Similar to my thread of a year ago, wanted to share a couple more freight cars I've been building on the side: Conrail N6A I've shown this Conrail transfer caboose in a couple of my threads, but never formally, so here it is. The prototype is one of several classes of transfer caboose Conrail inherited from the Penn Central. The model was designed almost two years ago, and I got around to putting it together last year. The "skirt" that covers the tops of the wheels is typically the toughest thing to model on American freight cars: if you run on R40 track, the bogies usually need to pivot enough such that the wheels will scrape... this isn't a problem on the N6A because it's quite short; no fancy engineering is required to compensate! The geometry of the skirt and such are still similar to that of my earlier flatcar. And with stickers Brickshelf Gallery PRR G43 Like the caboose, this gondola might have shown up a few times, but never formally. The G43 is a 52' gondola built during the last decade of the PRR. Most of them went to PC and then Conrail. This model was designed and built last year. The dimensions are very similar to the aforementioned flatcar, and it's basically built the same way: the structural component (the sides) is studs-out, and the floor and trucks are studs-up. Once again, much of the work done to make the skirts work on the flatcar are applicable here. Thus, the hardest thing here was figuring out what to do about the shallow trapezoidal part in the middle - eventually I went with wing plates. Finally, this probably should have been dark red or reddish brown, but all three colors seemed to somewhat off, so I ended up going with the most common. I also looked at weathered designs, but its a little bit too difficult when there are a lot of large, exposed parts like the wings. Brickshelf Gallery Alaska Railroad 15800 Series This is a side-dump car, typically used for MoW work. Technically Wikipedia thinks its a type of gondola. As you can see, the specialized feature of this type of car is that it empties sideways: unfortunately the model does not have this feature! This car has actually never been posted: I only recently completed the design and model: Doing the textures on the sides was a little big challenging, especially trying to "blend" it with the ends. On the prototype there are a ton of funny angles that are hard to model in LEGO. Construction is otherwise typical: studs-out for the body, studs-up for the chassis. Those droid-body things are really good for the big pneumatic pistons. Brickshelf gallery Finally, this is a repost, but here is the gondola and caboose running with my EMD Model 40:

Nice! I hope someday our LUG will be able to have a wide-radius layout like this