ivanlan9

Adorable!

Neat. However, not only have I never watched Heartbeat, I've never heard of it before!

Very nice! Great trucks!

Your brother works for GE? Cool. Is he still working for them after the sale of the locomotive business to Wabtec? Or is he now with Wabtec.

Very nice!

@SerperiorBricks has an amazing design to turn Studgate into a very nice train shed, which they've combined with a couple of the Boutique Hotel modulars for the station/terminus. If I have any suggestions, it would be to add support pillars between the tracks of the shed. Other than that, the design looks impressively European and charming. The set would have to retail for $1000+, of course, but golly, how nice it looks!

Agreed. Quite charming!

Very nice! Looks like a lot of Harry Potter three-decker buses sacrificed themselves to help build your Hamburger!

Looks like you had a far better experience than I did. Good show! Those mods look very nice.

I have multiple copies of the original Santa Fe units bought when they came out, both the early & late versions. I think 6 of the locos all together? I have two locos plus a B unit on display (but very dusty, sigh). And I have all of the passenger cars--enough to build the whole five-car train (also on very dusty display). Not one came in LBG, every single one was in the old grey color. Of course the ridged blocks had that silvery color that made the train cars so special. So even though, as Toastie says, you have a Santa Fe unit, it is almost certainly not an original one. I hope very much you got a good price. For 6-wide diesels, you don't get a lot better than this, at least from Lego.

I'll buy this one, even if it is steam; it'll go well with the Emerald Night. Those two little cars will make up one big one. It's possible I'll learn from the EN experience and buy two or three sets in order to have three long carriages. I especially like the station: not only did it appear in the HP films, but it was also used in the new, remade, "All Creatures Great and Small," which to my mind is much better than the old series. But YMMV. ...

My favorite Sith Lord is at it again! Great job, as usual, and of course we all hate you very much, @Sérgio! Sigh.

As I said, I was disappointed in the set, but I did say that it was my experience only, others might be happy with it. For me, the ill-fitting roof and the missing bag combined to convince me that it wasn't my cuppa. I really wanted the set and tried hard to like it. And I, too, wish very much TLG would produce a station set worthy of the Lego brand. But I think that's naive to hope for nowadays. They're in business to produce *toys*, not to cater to a minority within a minority. While they're leaving millions of dollars on the table (all those after-market suppliers!), what they are after is *billions.*

I returned StudGate Station Monday. I know, everyone gasps . But I had good reasons. Since the pre-orders sold out so quickly (I think I heard three hours?), I was delighted to have managed to pre-order so fast. Then I forgot I bought it until I got the shipping notice. As usual, other kits and other tasks interfered, but I was finally able to start on it week before last. 1) For a $400USD kit, they could've included printed instructions. The inconvenience was strengthened when the card in the box point to a dead URL for the PDF. I eventually tracked it down before Lego responded to my email. 2) Things went fine until I assembled the roofs on the two commuter cars. They wouldn't fit properly: pushing one end down until it snapped onto the top of the car meant that the other end raised up a little. It looked very much like a better fit would have resulted if the roofs were one stud longer, but I can't be sure of that, as I planned to come back to that after I'd finished building the whole kit. I wasn't happy, however: I'm not accustomed to poor fit in Lego-designed models. I chalked it up to the fan designer, whom I believe to be the same person who designed the Botanical Gardens, which Lego did not pick up after it achieved 10000 supports. I bought the Chinese-made Gardens kit, however, for under $100, which I enjoyed quite a bit. On that, the building structure was fine and went together quite well, even though it required a little more dexterity and fiddling to achieve stability. The plants inside were mostly OK, but the taller ones in the middle of the building fell off/apart when trying to install the walls. It still looked fine, even with fewer plants inside, and I was very happy with the value. I ended up taking it apart and putting the parts in my non-Lego parts box. On the train roofs, I figured I could rework them later, but I was a little irked that the design, with the Lego and Bricklink logos on it, might not be what I've come to expect over the years (more on this later). 3) I then went on to the (huge) baseplate and began building up the foundaton. Once again, everything went fine--until I got to the bags numbered "5". There should've been 3, but there were only two. I tried making up the missing bits from my own collection, but when I realized that the two bags I had contained less then half the parts I needed, I stopped and recovered the parts I'd supplied. 4) I've been buying & building Lego kits since 1990, the tail end of the 4.5v era. I'm talking probably 500 sets or so (which includes every 9v set, as well as the Airport Monorail [at a very good price!]). In all that time, I think I've had missing parts in 10 or fewer sets, and never more than a single part in a set. Never had a bag missing until Studgate. Which left me with no confidence in the quality control for the beast. 5) Coupled with the ill-fitting roofs, the missing bag pushed me over the edge: I did not want the kit. 6) So I called Lego and complained. The very nice young woman on the other end was very sympathetic, and as always, Lego Customer Service was stellar. I had my return label before I even hung up the phone. She told me, "Stick the label to the box, drop it off, and you're done." I did just that: I taped the label to the outside of the box, as I had already recycled the corrugated box it shipped to me in. Maybe I overreacted. But my feeling was that if the quaility control was bad enough to miss a minimum of a whole bag of parts, there was no telling what else was missing--or going to fit poorly. Honestly, I can get missing parts and poor fit from the lesser-quality non-Lego bricks. I was deeply disappointed in Lego. Perhaps others had better experiences: I'd be very interested in hearing them.

Wow.

Nice work! But I have to point out that the big windows run $15 each, and you've got 8, so that's $120US right there. ...

A real charmer. Very nice job!

$155 is cheap at today's prices. Other teakettles have cost their builders far greater amounts--and some of the kits go for $1000 and up. Yes, Lego could have made this engine cheaper--but it wouldn't have the quality of this build, owing to compromises made for production reasons. Also, they didn't: they offered something for $500 that uses plain old red bricks. Which is incompatible with everything. Ugh.

Sweet! Vastly superior to the $500 official Lego monstrosity. ...

Really nice work. If instructions were to become available, I'd leap at them. Just sayin'. BTW, I have three versions of the original 9v 4551; I've bought six of them all together. One version is green, with a number of modifications. Nothing close to this, though, as mine are all 6-wide.

Mine just arrived today. I haven't even cracked the box! I'm still working on the Jazz Club modular, but I'll start on Studgate soon. Probably next week. I also plan to do a review, with pix, of the BlueBrixx Engine Hall, but will post that in a different forum. Short take: very nicely done, clutch excellent, mishaps few.

I have to say that out of the dozen or so Cobi kits I've built (tanks & cars), I have never, ever had a single piece missing. Also no extras! I had a very hard time locating one of their very, very tiny pieces when it bounced onto the kitchen floor, especially since my cat tried to "help." After all, I was down there at his level, I must want to play.

Lego will never go for such an immense loco as a kit, not even if it's only a display model like the HP monstrosity. Something this big would have to sell for over $1000US. And they know they'd only sell five. Nice teakettle, by the way.

@jburgt Thank you very much for correcting the link. The PDF was exactly what I wanted. Guess I'll have to break down & buy some cubes!

Criminy, Glenn. Masterpiece is right. You should send a link to Tony Koester at MR. He'd enjoy the hell out of this. I do too, despite its being steam.