MOD & MOC: Americanized Emerald Night with full train, mail cars

[Lord Insanity]

I have been working on this here and there for the past several months. I love steam engines but until the Emerald Night set came out there really wasn't a good LEGO set of one. Being from the U.S. the set was a little too European for my tastes. So I basically made a cross between the official set and the 4-6-2 Southern Crescent. Higher-res pictures and a short video of the train running can be found on my Flickr Account.

Here you can see I motorized the tender.

I never really liked the original roof on the dinning car or the fact that its ends had no doors so I changed all of my cars to fix that.

Car 1 is the first-class dinning car. The inside is stock with seating for 4. I made the front truck motorized giving the entire train two 9v motors.

Car 2 is the second-class passenger car. The inside has face to face seating for 6.

Car 3 is the third-class passenger car. The inside has row seating for 7.

Cars 4 and 5 are the mail cars. I designed them after the classic 7819 Mail Car set. Originally I tried to make the cargo doors actually open but the only solution I came up with that fit the height restrictions was too wide to actually use the inside anyway.

I forgot to replace the place holder 1x4 plates on the cargo doors of car 5 with the correct 1x6 for the picture.

For the caboose I wanted to match the engine and tender livery so as to signify the LRTS livery in my town. I used the rare centered cupola design as that fit with my roof design better.

Yes there is a full minifig standing up looking out the cupola.

And here is my bad attempt at a full train shot. As my camera has no flash, I had to get too far away for these to come out very good.

And here is a short video of the train running with its two 9v motors. I kept all the internal gearing (just took the one gear of the drive axle so it turns freely) in the main engine as eventually I plan to convert it to use an XL PF motor. I need those two 9v motors for my eventual Maresk train.

[L@go]

Nice, huge and imposing! I like it, especially all the cars and what you've done with the roof sections. Makes me want to set up my own EN with the three cars and caboose that I've got - but I haven't really got the room at the moment...

[Sir E Fullner]

Very good job, I must say. It almost reminds me of the Rainbow Sun.