TeddytheSpoon

Ooooh! That sounds fun too! Damn, is this the year I get back into buying LEGO trains...?!

Thank you all! I'm glad you like my model! That's part of the appeal for me, I have to be honest! It's a nice halfway house between the parts investment required of bigger trains, while still being able to get some good details in. I have some freight wagon designs in the works, and have figured out a way to motorise a chassis, so hopefully there will be more to show in the next few weeks!

OK the Scion shuttle is WILD. But they're all great of course!

Fantastic! Great way to add an extra dimension to playing trains!

I'm sort of the same, although I'm not sure there's any that I actively dislike. I just write those off as 'not for me' - life is too short to spend time disliking stuff! That said, of the series I like, this is what's near the top: Andor Bad Batch Rebels Mando (S3 really brings down the average but I have to remember how good the first two seasons were) Clone Wars 08 Clone Wars 03 (up until S7 of the Filoni one, these two would've been swapped) Tales of the *insert faction here* (mostly decent but I REALLY liked the Dooku episodes. More TPM-era content please!) Visions Acolyte (this and Visions get extra points for being something new that took a risk, which is something I think Star Wars doesn't do anywhere near enough) Kenobi (I'm a sucker for Ewan McGregor)

Definitely agreed on this - I was just thinking the other day that I should start buying City sets again, as the quality of designs seems to be excellent! Given what a broad church City seems to be these days, what with Arctic, space and jungle sets among other things, I'm really looking forward to seeing what they can do with these train designs!

I think it has much less to do with this perceived controversy, and more to do with how utterly mid TBoBF was. The Bad Batch was mentioned earlier and got just two sets, even though it was pretty well-received. No way TBoBF was swallowing up more set slots than that, irrespective of how good they might have been.

Agreed, with the shunter it makes for a smart little consist! Perhaps moving wagons from a mainline delivery to whatever local industrial plant needs them? I've seen plenty of photos of real world trains just like this!

The "& AI" bit is incredibly disappointing from LEGO... but at least the tracks look nice! Rack-and-pinion railways, anyone?

Oooh, steam train! I hope it looks alright. Am I right in thinking that would be the first non-licensed LEGO steamer since the Emerald Night (at least one that gets a wide release)?

This is why, as long as the amount of regular sets remains the same (which it appears to be), I'm not too worried about Smart Bricks. Almost every single piece of tech LEGO has done hasn't had a great deal of staying power in comparison to the bricks; the only possible exception for me is Mindstorms, and even that has been through three or four iterations. In a few years the SBs will fall out of fashion and LEGO will move on to something new. I suspect they're being inserted into Star Wars sets to try and get kids buying them again - the 18+-ification of the theme has been quite well documented here. It's a double-edged sword for sure, but I do think if anyone figures out how to re-code the bricks, the community will be able to do some awesome stuff with them. I can think of a few applications for trains or cars, for instance.

Nice model! Attractive loco. Is that a high-voltage warning sticker on the boiler service hatch?

Thank you, that means a lot! And thank you also @JopieK for the feature!

Thank you all! You're very kind. A motorised box car or parcels wagon is something I am considering. The only possible snag is that wagons would mostly use the same #4 wheels as the pony trucks here, which don't have an o-ring. So I'm not sure how good the traction will be - it might be OK for shorter trains. It is something I will test! Re: the ladders - just after I photographed this, I noticed that the tiny ladder now appears in black in one of this year's new City sets. I may have to pick one up as it's perfect - if on the big side - for the one on the bunker!

Happy new year, train techies! Some of you may remember a couple years ago I started designing standard-gauge trains using narrow-gauge track. After doing a few Swiss models, I took a break, but kept thinking about doing some British steam locos at some point. I'd like to present the first one to be finished in bricks - one that, I'm not kidding, came to me in a dream! This is a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) Ivatt 2-6-2T tank engine. Essentially, the LMS' version of the GWR's successful Prairies, and (I believe) one of the last locos to be designed by the railway before it was absorbed into British Railways. When I was younger, I had an N-gauge model of this same loco. I had a dream about it one day last summer, and upon waking up thought it would make a good candidate for my first attempt at a steam locomotive in this odd scale! There are a few differences to the Swiss trains I built in the past. Firstly, the British standard gauge makes trains designed around this Trixbrix track closer to 1:60 scale than 1:64 - although it's not particularly noticeable given how different they are anyway. Since most things seem to end up somewhere between 5 and 6 studs wide, I'm tempted to just call this "5-wide scale" so as not to end up too pedantic. It's far from being a perfect scale model anyway! Secondly, and most importantly, I've taken the plunge into the world of custom wheels. The choice of LEGO wheels is incredibly limiting at this scale, and for a steam engine having these drivers is crucial to the look. This model has actually been built for nearly 6 months by now, but I was finally able to pick up some Breckland Bricks wheels over Christmas to finish it off. Special thanks to them for the #4 sizes that are necessary for the leading and trailing wheels! I've only pushed it through R80 curves so far, which it handles very well. I don't think it will take much to go through tighter bends - possibly removing some details. The running gear works well too. And to head off the inevitable questions: I'm afraid it isn't motorised! I wanted to focus on getting the details right, and to make it easier to make fuller consists (hence the big ugly magnet couplings). It might be possible to fit a Circuit Cubes motor, but it would require a significant re-design and would still be missing the receiver. I do have some ideas for something motorised at this scale though. Perhaps once that's done I'll show some videos of this one moving too!

Nice models! The bogie coaches looks great, nice way to bring in some realism.

Fantastic! And very well hidden too. Never mind wagons - we could get a whole gingerbread layout going... Wouldn't take much to convert the gingerbread house to a station building right...

I've ridden these very trains many a time. Nice model!

I was thinking of the former yes, but only because I forgot about 5264! It's true that these things are often all about compromises...

Definitely add Boss Nass and Padme in her battle gear (i.e. as she appears in the Battle of Theed) - would love to get those two. Other more minor ones you could add would be Fodesinbeed Addonue (the pod-race commentator), Kitster, or some more Neimoidians. If you take it to be TPM-era, you could throw in Jedi Dooku as he appeared in Tales of the Jedi.

Wow, this is great! If I may make one suggestion, could the handlebars be moved further back with a claw? Right now it looks like Roger is banging his chin on the top...! Either way, fantastic build. I'm amazed you crammed all those curves in such a small space.

Both for Depa. The new mould and her limited appearances in screen media, let alone in scenes that could be made into a set, throw her way down the list of Jedi That Could/Should Be Made IMO. As for the others... do you mean Sidious pre-disfiguring? I don't think there's any need for that at all tbh. Just swap out the head and boom, you're there. I'm also assuming you mean Senator Palpatine as he appears in TPM, in which case the argument for he and Valorum are the same: they appeared a couple times in one movie where basically nothing happened other than dialogue. I'd love a set based on the big bulbous shuttle thing or Theed, but us TPM fans are feeding off scraps as it is, so I don't think there's much chance of seeing official figures for those. I think Amedda's case for inclusion in sets is similar: he's in a lot of scenes, but with minimal dialogue and/or action. Pretty easy to fit in anything Senate-related. You can make a much better case for Boss Nass though. He can fit into pretty much any Naboo set that doesn't include Darth Maul (even an N-1, arguably). If/when LEGO does make another Naboo set, IMO it'll be a big miss if he's not in it.

Funnily enough (and presuming from the other thread that you didn't know what the planets line was), a lot of those did actually get made. I liked the Planets series. I thought they made for fun display sets on a budget. Although the big planet pieces inflated the price, some of them were actually quite interesting (and plenty have been used in unique MOCs down the years). I might have a think later of which planets I'd make.

I was thinking to do one myself as the Flying Scotsman has been my favourite train since I was a kid. I only got as far as checking dimensions, which would have ended up with a four-wide boiler (which appears to be what you have here). But there are many more ideas to finish first!

Funnily enough I was just looking the other day at a 5-wide A1/A3. It would likely have ended up with some similar solutions to yours. Very nice model, and I agree that the brick-built lettering is great!