_citizen_dane_

You’ve echoed my thoughts exactly. Maybe it comes from my intense interest in historical, real-world North American city planning, but I always get a chuckle out of these modulars which include buildings, that in real-life, would only have a frontage of maybe three or four meters. I don’t know. It’s LEGO, of course, so you’re not bound to the arbitrary realities of real life zoning and practicality, but that won’t stop me from thinking they look just a wee bit silly. I do think your second point is spot on. Since LEGO’s broken from the larger, pre-Detective’s Office frontages, space has been a real issue. When most facades range from sixteen to twenty studs-wide, having four taken up by stairs doesn’t leave much usable floor behind. And that’s not me saying that space in the pre-D.O. buildings had a lot of great use either — often suffering the inverse problem of too much space making them seem empty — but in a case like this, a city’s central police station, I think a large thirty-two wide facade would have been justified. Either that, or like you say, maybe have the station enlarged to something like twenty-two studs, and the donut shop to ten. Having got that all out of the way, I do genuinely really like the design of the central building. The technique used to create the quoins stands out as especially unique, while the use of a bog-standard, red rubber band as linking tape on the post-it board is a really clever touch.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions everyone, I genuinely appreciate them! As for the ½ plate inset doors, I actually contemplated trying to do something like that. The doors are my only major contention with my design from a purely “real-life-to-model” translation, because they lack the clear definition that the real deals have. Unfortunately, the big problem comes with the way the cab itself is designed: The whole thing is mostly snot. As you can see, between the curves of the cab and where the body would be (beginning with the grey bricks), there’s a plate’s-width, used to extend the cab slightly beyond the furthest reach of the roof — this was done to try and approximate the subtle slope the front of the vehicles have. Those plates are the 2x2’s that only feature two sets of studs on them. I chose them because it allowed for both something to build on and a place for the sloping plates to abut against, whilst providing the strongest connection. From there the doors are directly connected, which themselves are connected directly to the body. Like zephyr1934 correctly alludes to, I couldn’t really find a replacement or solution that was sufficiently stable enough for my liking, that also achieved the inset. I am going to toy around once I get the bricks in hand though and see if there’s any other connection points I missed out on that could act as a substitute so I could focus on the doors. As I said, I do hope to build a second car at some point, so if I can come up with some kind of solution, I’ll be sure to add them to that and go back and add it to this one.

Hey everyone! Despite having an account on here for the better part of a year-and-a-half, I’ve yet to actually post anything I’ve designed. After finishing this model I figured I may as well do something about that... Like the title says, my model’s based upon a Siemens-Duewag U2 Light Rail Vehicle, particularly those employed by the transit system of Edmonton, Canada — my home. Historically, Edmonton became the first North American city with a population of less than one million to implement a light rail transit system. When it did so in 1978 no North American companies were producing cars to meet the line’s requirements. So, Edmonton Transit turned to West Germany and ordered fourteen U2 Light Rail Vehicles. Over the following decade-and-a-half another twenty-three would be purchased. As the system’s continued to grow over the last forty years the older U2’s have been supplemented by newer SD-160’s, yet they still make up a sizeable portion of ETS’ LRT fleet. Thanks to both my love for the real things and my city’s history, I’ve always wanted to try designing a brick-built version. While the U2 is pretty much the pinnacle of boxy ‘70s Late Modernist design, there’s some subtle curves to their cab sections, and particularly the windshields, that I challenged myself to translate into plastic. Here’s a picture of one of the real cars, courtesy of barp.ca. Unfortunately I was unable to recreate the sweet livery (sadly since replaced by something way more boring) at this scale. When I build one in real life I’ll have to resort to some decal work. I’m hoping to eventually construct two separate cars to couple together. For much of our LRT system’s early existence that was standard set-up along the line. I should say, I hope to construct two barring any unforeseen challenges of converting a perfect 3D model into the real-deal. The articulating section at the centre of the vehicle may be a cause for worry given how I’ve designed it, but here’s hoping it works. To be perfectly honest, when it comes to Lego my area of expertise is architecture — I love to design and build buildings based on those from my city. This is one of my few forays into attempting to design a train from the ground up, so as a result it’s not really built to a particular scale, just more so what looks right next to some other vehicles and structures I’ve built. So please, by all means, let me know what you think! Don’t hold me to it, but I’m hoping to add some real life photos to this thread once I get my pieces in…

Completely agreed on both accounts. The old torsos are a really ingenious part usage