Town and Train Displays

[WesternOutlaw]

I was looking at some of the great Cities/Towns that many of you have shared over EB, and it got me thinking, what do most City/Town fans enjoy displaying more?

Official Lego Sets, MOCs, or Combining Both into one display. I'd be curious as to what most prefer. Share your thoughts on this topic.

[Flatfoot Thompsen]

I preffered official sets.

[Darth_Legois]

A mix of both i guess [somehow alot of my sets end up in pieces and then into mocs.....lol]

[adik_sa_lego]

i also do a combination between MOCs and Official sets. I almost never buy a set for parts; the only time I did was when i bought buy two 8143's to build both the red and yellow variant, so now I have extra of both the red and yellow body parts.

[Dragonator]

A nice idea for a poll. I don't have 'display' as such at the moment due to the lack of space, but I voted for a combination, as when I did have table space I had a town set up with official sets and one or two MOCs. Someday I'm going to build a big city scene with lots of MOC buildings. That's a while away though.

[WhiteFang]

Most of my City Collections are still sitting in MISB while my own town sets are in boxes.

If given a choice now, I will defintely lay out all my City and Town sets, and create an old town of mine. When I was like 4 years old, my dad and I created a town together, featured 1980s town sets. I still have that photo with me in one of my childhood albums.

For me, as I grew up, my perception changed and realised that it will look even fanastic with the combination of MOCs and Offical LEGO sets. Without this offical sets, I felt something is lacking in your town. Therefore, a mixture will be ideal in my opnion.

[legotrainfan]

I use a combination of MOCs and official LEGO sets... but I only have two MOCs. These are two waggons which I built with the spare parts of set 10183 and some additional plates. My quantity of bricks does not allow moccing yet. And I can't afford buying lots of parts. I'm still busy with buying 9V stuff; especially now since the production of 9V stuff has ended.

[welcomestranger]

I would definately have to vote for a combination... I would love to have the spare parts and creativity to make entire MOC towns, and I love looking at all your great pictures of custom cities... but for me I have to rely on the creativity of the good folks at Lego and maybe a few small MOC influences here and there :)

[Quarryman]

If I had the choice I would go for a pure MOC approach, which is what we in general did for our layout at Legoworld Oslo a month ago. I just feel that MOCs are more fun to display than sets. On the other hand, I probably will include Cafe Corner and its siblings in a proper layout once I a) have them b) have the room for a layout Still, for voting purposes I had to go with only MOCs, as I don't feel a mostly pure MOC layout with maybe two or three sets to be a "mixture"

[Klaus-Dieter]

That's a very interesting poll, TheBrickster!

For building up a nice City I definitely prefer official sets because they are mostly designed much more precisely and with much more details and nice addtional stuff - doing that yourself is very difficult because you often don't have the possibilities.

Of course I like MOCing, too - City houses is my favourite MOCing theme because you don't need many special bricks for it!

But putting both - official sets and MOCs - together in one City is for me absolutely :skull: !

Klaus-Dieter

[Hyphos]

I don´t create displays of Towns, but in prefer the combination of both, Set´s and Moc´s.

[Eilif]

MOCs s all the way. Some of this is the influence of the train club that I am a part of where almost everything is a MOC, but for all my 22 years of building, I've nearly always preferred my town designs or modded TLG designs to official sets. I'm a builder and not a set collector, so while I enjoy building the set first, it's the rare set that survives on my shelf for more than a few months before being radically modded, completely rebuilt, or sorted into the larger collection. There are a few exceptions of course, so some StarWars, Indy, and the Cafe/Market/Grocer series, have a longer "shelf life".

Thus, for my 80"x40" seaside town display/module, (half of which is visible here http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=309896) I essentially use MOCs exclusively. I am not great at designing vehicles so I have a few modded TLG vehicles, but the Indiana Jones moto w/sidecar is the only unmodded TLG design on the entire module.

My humble opinion only of course: TLG designs are cute, and nostaligic, and represent the highest level of the toy-designers craft, but MOC's are the very spirit of LEGO creative play.

Edited June 3, 2008 by Eilif

[Minifig Lecturer]

Has to be MOCs. All the best cities use mostly MOCs as very few LEGO sets are realistic (excluding CC style and a rare few others).

There is always room for some official sets IMO, but not the more recent ones.

[Joebot]

I'm a builder and not a set collector.

I think that's a great way of saying it, Eilif. I agree. A big collection of official sets is impressive, I guess, but it's not much different than looking at a big collection of action figures, or stamps, or coins, or baseball cards, or Lladro statues. It's impressive because of the scope and the money invested in it; but there's not a lot of creativity behind it.

[Eilif]

I think that's a great way of saying it, Eilif... A big collection of official sets is impressive... but there's not a lot of creativity behind it.

Thanks, that's pretty much my feelings on the matter. They can both be impressive, but in a comparison of nostalgic vs. inspirational, I'll take inspirational every time. That said, I'm glad there are some collectors out there, because a layout or presentation of classic sets is always neat to look at and brings back great memories.

As for me, I'm not as tallented or experienced as the LEGO designers, and nothing I've made compares to Green Grocer (currently my favorite set), but even if there were, and I could afford, a whole city's worth of Cafe/Market/Grocer style sets my module or display still wouldn't contain many/any of them.

Edited June 5, 2008 by Eilif