Redimus

Nope. As a fan of actual trains You'd basically have to start from scratch on that. Sure, if they did a decent steam loco I'd totally buy it, but other than a black and red colour scheme, I'm not sure how they would make it look anything like the original set without alienating people who just want another good Lego set. What have you been smoking?

I hardly see the point. Virtually all the classic sets are light years behind the quality of modern sets, so are unlikely to be of interest to anybody outside of the small group of hardcore classic Lego train collectors. Also, lest we forget, the vast majority of classic train sets, powered or otherwise, rely heavily on parts that Lego no longer has the machinery to make.

I'd recommend putting the bogies closer to the ends. Also is the bufferbeam/coupling attached to the main body or extended out from the bogie assembly? If it's not attached to the bogies, the coaches will become uncoupled on the corners, especially with the large overhang each end has. Otherwise it's looking smart, keep up the good work!

I've dabbled with one of the other sets from that lot. The clutch power is actually pretty good (sometimes a little too good). The couplings vary in quality from pretty much as reliable as Lego's own to complete waste of time, with the average being not quite as good as the original, and *most* of the wheels were acceptable, although I had at least one set of wheels the made an irritating squealing noise and wobbled. I bashed two of the same set together to get a pretty decent loco, but to be honest, the set I got was only one with half decent wagons and a locomotive I actually liked the look of. Here's the original loco: And here's my heavily modded (but still mostly original off brand pieces) loco:

This sounds more like a 'design a City set' competition than the higher end stuff that is normally the area Ideas covers. Overall, I like the idea, and might see what I can do, but 1000 parts sounds *very* limiting. Still, I'll be interested to see how this goes (whether I manage to chip in or not), and no doubt some successful train based Ideas sets would be great.

Time to bombard them with demands! My bad, I missed that.

Government waste? It's clearly a private railway lol.... And lay off the guy, we're all interested in trains here and this is a random and unusual thing. So, who wants to group together and get ourselves some narrow gauge track so we can build some truly epic mocs to run on it? lol

I like it, hope it does better than the majority of train Ideas.

Hmmm, the front side windows look like they could be rather fragile, might it be worth shortening the windows by one plate and adding some overlapping black plates to sure them up a bit? Looks wise, it's really cool.

How come you gave up on it? What you got up to looks really good.

I'm using a similar technique on the 8 wheeled tender for my current project. It works a treat with the middle two wheelsets 'floating'.

Seems early British electrics and German electrics shared a few genes: That was part of a colliery's private fleet, but at the time the North Eastern Railway had some electrics for coal trains on the mainline too, which were basically larger examples of the same theme. Electrification was completed on a small section of the network early in the first world war, but although successful, and despite designing an express passenger loco too, the war plus changes in coal demands put paid to further electrification.

What did you use for the smokebox?

EN's is larger (mostly through extra plates under the curves) and considerably more hollow. How big a boiler do you need? There's a *lot* of techniques, all with their advantages and disadvantages, but one just because idea may be perfect for one loco doesn't mean it fits at all on another.

Do you have any more video of the steam engines on your layout, the tantalising glimpses we had looked awesome.

that looks amazing!

I don't know about other countries, but in the UK double chimneys were always built as a one piece oval with two holes rather than 2 separate chimneys, Because of this, it looks a bit weird to me.

There's probably an argument for both, but German locos are both much more recognisable than French locos and, I think, easier to pull off in Lego, thanks to their generally very utilitarian design.

The problem with Greatrix' undoubtedly brilliant designs is that he cheats. A lot. I've always refused to physically alter any Lego element that isn't one of those tubes (handrails would be largely impossible if you didn't). I think it's half the fun, knowing you achieved that without leaving the basic rules of the Lego system as sold to us (perhaps a little hypocritical seeing as I'm happy to use custom rods and wheels, but they aren't actually mutilated Lego... lol).

Could ask one of the admins on here to add them to the resources thread on this forum too (I'm always keen to see new ideas and reverse engineering them to fit my needs).

A backlog of Lego sets?!? When I started to get a backlog of DVDs, I realised it was a sign that I clearly wasn't watching them anymore lol.

It's a bit boring without the inset, that's the bit I liked the most, lol.

When I was in the process of designing my 7-wide Pullmans, I happened across your 6 wide ones, and I was extremely tempted to ditch my original plan of upscaling my own 6-wide and go with a design inspired by your design it looked so good. In the end I decided to stick with the hard to build but more realistic slightly inset doors (which have no play value at all I'm afraid) because it closer fitted the style and scale I want for my MoCs going forward. As for the clearance issues, is there no way to have the loops extend out a bit, or do the points have parallel exits?

Depends who you're building the MoCs for. I found I slowly stopped using play features on my MoCs as it both became obvious I never used them, and they were just making it harder to achieve what I wanted with the looks, but if I had any kids who would actually use the features, I'd probably still use them. If you do want to go a bit more 'realistic' (it's always going to be a relative term in Lego), just start designing with a whole train in mind, but consider what you already have so you can run it with something until the full train is complete. I started with a very toy-like 6 wide blue steam engine, and toy-like 6 wide coaches (with opening doors!) to go with it. Then a slightly less toy like additional 6-wide coach to try out some techniques. Taking what I'd learnt from the first loco (and this forum) I went for a much more realistic 7 wide steam engine which shared the coaches until I had built a rake of 7 wide trucks for it. Then I significantly upscale and improve the ideas behind the 3 coach to build a couple of 7 wide coaches which could go behind either loco and still look fine, but which will eventually go with a 7 wide express steam loco, leaving me with 3 steam era 'sets', the 6 wide toy-like passenger train, the 7 wide freight train and 7 wide express train. Also bare in mind that even Lego don't play hard and fast with their widths, Emerald Night was (in places) 8 wide, and still didn't look completely stupid in front of it's 6 wide coach (although I'd argue that EN is not a great example of Lego engineering myself).

At the moment, the difference in the price between a second hand 9v motor and PF motor/receiver/battery box is still in favour of the 9v motor, so I'd stick with that (assuming you can't fix it) for now. For me, the real issue isn't the price though, it's the compromises you have to make to fit PF. I doubt it, the tender on that set is smaller than one of my MoCs which I've tried (and failed) to satisfactorily convert to PF, it won't hide the full sides and there's no chance at all of covering the top of the box without some significant redesigning. You'd need a much taller tender which would look really weird on an engine that size.