Black Knight

Dude. By current (western) moral standards, a circus with real wild animals is out of the question for TLG. Heck this is even forbidden in quite many countries from Denmark to Mexico. Maybe they could do some Around the World in Eighty Days theme and visit the elephants in their natural habitat. But no loading on the train wagons, it's verboten!

I totally agree and would prefer more quality for a higher price. But I am not sure, if this would be beneficial to BB: Their brand is nothing like the LEGO brand and so they cannot demand the same. Their sets have a much, much lower volume while at the same time, they need to pay a third party for their bricks. I'd guess that BB currently is probing the market with higher quality bricks in their 8w locomotives, to see if your claim is right. The HdS also claimed in one video, that the BB "Pro" sets would have higher quality bricks; maybe they can actually demand better bricks from their supplier for a higher price or maybe they just now -- that they are big enough -- can.

@AndreMWI suppose you should have actually watched his videos. Bricked4You is e.g. totally happy with the BB VT100 (8w). He would probably be pretty pissed, if you refer to his channel as "documenting BB problems". For my personal impression of BB: They are continually getting better. If you bought some old model from them some years ago, you'd be pretty underwhelmed with the brick quality (primarily clamping force of e.g. headlights and scratches). As they are using much more advanced building techniques than TLG and sometimes rely on the clamping force of that one knob -- that will lead to disaster, if you want to play with those models. Their most recent bricks are pretty decent and have a slightly higher clamping force than LEGO, so the handling of the models has much improved. They still do not have XL-wheels, so some of their 6w steam locomotives still are lacking. But as there are people that build 8w steam locos with L-wheels, ymmv. All in all: If you want a box-shaped locomotive or waggon or a building, their quality problem is of no concern. If you want a steam locomotive, there is no place else, you could buy one from. The one thing that people often forget when looking at BB: Whats is the alternative? What are you comparing their stuff to? Sure you can buy an old LEGO Emerald with one waggon for 500+ EUR instead. Sure you can MOC something in 100+ hours and 300+ EUR instead. Sure you can buy a MK, Kazi, LEGO or even Duplo play-train instead. Sure current TLG instructions are easier to follow. Sure you can buy some PDF instructions for 10 EUR and pay 300+ EUR on Bricklink. But BB is the only company that sells model trains from bricks for decent money. If you want something for your 3 year old to play with, if you have large amounts of time and money, if you prefer "fantasy" trains, if you are an inexperienced builder: You will find something better elsewhere.

Well, your online shop tells me that tracks "can’t be shipped to your address". But I'd guess that the package from Canada will not arrive in Germany on time for Christmas anyway. Bummer.

Oh my. JB-Spielwaren has the R72 as EOL / none left.

Well, no; actually it's the other way round: Large companies have LESS overhead as they take advantage of economies of scale. And we actually do know how much of the money you pay for a LEGO set will land in Kristiansen's pocket: In 2020 TLG had a business volume of 5.9 billion EUR. And they made a revenue of 1.7 billion EUR. So for every Euro/Dollar/etc. you pay, 29 cents go directly to Kristiansen. 29%! No way any of the other brick manufacturers has an EBIT margin as mindboggingly high as that of TLG. Heck, not even Apple has an operating profit margin this high. TLG does not avoid magnets (or whatever) because they cannot, but because they do not want to. Maybe else they would have to move some of their production to low-cost countries or fire some quality control engineers to get to the same profitability.

Well, at least we can wait for MOCs "40518 in 6w". Maybe I'll treat myself with a "40518 in 8w" (aka MK 12002).

No. If those morals were a reasonable buying decision, no one would buy the Kiddicraft-clone either. They are just a posteriori rationalizations for an already existing choice. TLG is not just the biggest toy maker in the world because some other players in the market makes bad instructions. They get bought for the brand. Look around, there are so many people here that would never even consider another brand -- irrespective of quality, instructions or support. They want the LEGO brand because of the associated prestige. People with money will buy a Porsche, even though a Fiat might do what they need in a car. COBI prices are a bad example: They have much higher manufacturing costs than TLG (prints, less scaling effects, no Chinese factory); they cater solely for a niche market were TLG is not a competitor; and foremost, their tiny manufacturing capacity was hit by this huge COVID-triggered demand. Don't get me wrong, I very much like LEGO. But -- to get back to the original point: LEGO is neither a brick manufacturer nor a set vendor for us, it is a premium brand, that's their primary asset.

The company BlueBrixx apparently tried this -- with them as intermediary I suppose -- several years ago but it was declined by TLG. And from a business perspective rightly so: For TLG its most valuable asset is its LEGO brand value. You can simply demand a lot more money if you have LEGO printed on the box. Companies like Mattel, Shantou City Golds Precision Technology or COBI have similar brick quality, but can only demand a fraction of what TLG does. With TLG's current mindboggingly EBIT, they would be idiots to even consider such a proposal. Unless TLG is much less profitable than today, one could hope for something like that to succeed. Bummer; but that's cold, hard business.

Are you sure about that? The FAQ explicitly mentions third party power supplies. I'd rather guess that this is more a convenience and/or lack-of-know-how question -- as is with 9V trains.

O.k. the 12V might not kill the TLG train motor. But you can bring other 9V components to field via Michael's power-wheel or motor and we will find something that will not tolerate the 12V. It's a good idea to have the ability to switch between 9V and 12V, but it is imho a suboptimal design decision to put this "administrative" and potentially dangerous feature -- that you will only use occasionally if at all -- next to the "play" interface. I'd rather see buttons like "light on/off" or "make sound" on top, but this if course depends on what the regulator actually can do (aside from 9V compatibility mode). The 9V wall adaptor might just not work if the electronics rely on the 12V rail -- or maybe the wall adapter doesn't even have 12V; the norm for digital model railroad power supplies seems to be ~20V these days.

Very interesting indeed. The most interesting stuff is more about what those buttons actually do or more broadly: Whats inside this box. E.g. I suspect that you can switch between some LEGO-9V-compatibility mode and Michaels 12V-mode for his upcoming motors. This might be an interesting button for your kids to spontaneously obsolete your old LEGO 9V motors by pressing that 12V-mode button... ;)

Vendor lock-in! Pure genius to make your grandson depend solely on you. But on a little more serious thought: Ausini has tracks with 1-stud wide sleepers for quite a while -- but afaik you only get S16 and R40 elements there. And if you don't care about compatibility with L-gauge anyway, then there is the Märklin 29730: A H0 train set where you build with bricks atop H0 bogies -- and it's even track powered and of course motorized. For me personally, your approach breaks compatibility too hard: It is of course much easier to design things that are free of any existing constraints, so I understand the fun in taking a green field approach. I just think that in the long run you decouple your world from everything else. Any innovation or work done by 3rd parties will pass your system by. And in our world of specialization and division of labor this will hit your system pretty hard: Both in terms of cost and novelty. If this is just a toy for a couple of years, this is fine. If it's your personal hobby, this is also fine. But I am not sure, that if this becomes your grandson's own hobby, he will be happy in the long run with your decision.

Holy cow. Those ads are pretty depressing: You are financially successful, nevertheless lonely and full of self-pity? You can escape your misery for a while by buying some LEGOs! And I'd also say that I wouldn't see the monorail as an subtle hint or something. I'd guess that as background for this 60's future setting the alternative would have been an atomic car or something -- which has fallen out of fashion pretty hard; thus leaving you with the monorail or... nothing.

Thats easy: Do as you like best! I usually personally prefer 6w trains for practical reasons, but dislike the comic style of most TLG trains (e.g. 60197, 60198). ... which is an impressive MOC. I fear it's impractical to run though, or at least you need to resort to additional tricks like ball-bearings etc. Thats a gray area. Most people in the train section are pragmatics who are just fine using 3rd party bricks, so it's probably one of the most liberal eurobricks sections with the least amount of purists. But as I said, it's a gray area and if your post is found by the wrong moderator, they might put their foot down and silence you. If you talk about BBB wheels the chances are probably zero that this happens, but I have been (only once though) shut down for recommending some Chinese bricks. If you can read my post, take it as a proof of this forum's tolerance. ;)

from math import sin, cos, radians, sqrt, pow, fmod # our base (0, 0) is not a stud! (0.5, 0.5) is the first stud on our central baseplate # therefore integer coordinates are only reachable by jumper plate, e.g. (1, 1) with a 87580 placed in the left, upper corner of our baseplate # all studs of the sleeper plate 2x8 (or underlying ballase plate 2x10) plate8 = list((x, y) for x in [-0.5, 0.5] for y in [-3.5, -2.5, -1.5, -0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5]) plate10 = list((x, y) for x in [-0.5, 0.5] for y in [-4.5, -3.5, -2.5, -1.5, -0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5]) # rotate a single vector @v by angle @a def rotate(a, v): x = cos(a) * v[0] - sin(a) * v[1] y = sin(a) * v[0] + cos(a) * v[1] return (x, y) # rotate a list of vectors @s by angle @a def rotate_set(a, s): a = radians(a) return list(map(lambda e: rotate(a, e), s)) # rebase a list of vectors @s by polar coordinates (angle @a, radius @r) def rebase(a, r, s): a = radians(a) x0 = r * sin(a) y0 = r * cos(a) return list(map(lambda v: (x0 + v[0], y0 + v[1]), s)) # transform a list of vectors by rotating, then rebasing them def transform(a, r, s): s1 = rotate_set(a, s) return rebase(a, r, s1) # fitness is the euclidian distance to the closest stud (direct or jumper plate) -- less is a better! (0 is a perfect fit) def fitness(v): x0 = fmod(fabs(v[0]), 0.5) y0 = fmod(fabs(v[1]), 0.5) x0 = x0 if x0 < 0.25 else (x0 - 0.5) y0 = y0 if y0 < 0.25 else (y0 - 0.5) return sqrt(pow(x0, 2) + pow(y0, 2)) # R72 px = [] # iterate over number of 2x8 sleepers in between 0..45 degree, determine angle for a in [x * (45.0/28.0) for x in range(0, 29)]: px += transform(a, 72, plate8) # sort by fitness ps = sorted(px, key=lambda v: fitness(v)) # display result -- descending fitness, so first ones are best for v in ps: print("%2f * %2f -> %5f" % (v[0], v[1], fitness(v))) This snippet assumes that all 2x8 sleepers are perfectly rotated around the center of the circle, there are no anomalies in the tracks. You need some magic for the tracks as the number of sleepers and their angles are product specific. The code first generates a long list of all studs from all sleepers from 0 to 45 degrees (inclusive), then sorts them by their distance to the closest stud (or halfway-in-between-studs space reachable by jumper plates). Unfortunately I had to put away my tracks so I cannot verify if any of those are good matches or if there are some errors in my code (there most probably are). Here are the top 12 matches (w/o the obvious matches at 0 degree) with their respective "fitness": 7.508604 * 71.988153 -> 0.014642 2.505111 * 72.485504 -> 0.015371 2.477064 * 73.485110 -> 0.027345 40.974248 * 57.509353 -> 0.027398 44.970437 * 56.994527 -> 0.030066 14.977741 * 72.520869 -> 0.030512 49.483610 * 53.026372 -> 0.031050 53.033009 * 49.497475 -> 0.033105 49.497475 * 53.033009 -> 0.033105 43.518792 * 56.970816 -> 0.034711 Feel free to steal my code. I'd be happy for feedback though. And yes: My python is a bit rusty and I tried to avoid libraries not in the standard library to make it easier for people to reuse it (e.g. numpy).

So he says that there are not enough trains and train-parts from TLG, also they are too expensive (prefers cheaper sets, separate carriages). And he dislikes special parts from BBB etc. because they are "illegal". He would like the same part from TLG though. Bad news: TLG will not do something as dumb as lower prices when they just (H1/2021) more than doubled their profit with their current prices! Our only chance is, that the City brand and the Creator Expert brand did very well and trains are a part of those. I think that the target audience which is wealthy enough to buy premium products like LEGO have a tendency to live in cities and therefore have homes which do not have the space for train layouts and instead prefer compact dust catchers not larger than a baseplate. Also in the segment for kids trains, you have a very strong -- and mindboggingly cheaper -- competition with e.g. BRIO trains and Playmobil trains. The brick-train segment for grown-ups is were the real money is. That's why you have all those small and medium sized companies producing wheels and tracks and locomotives and buildings and rolling stock for that market. If we are lucky we might get another Creator Expert locomotive or two, but I do not expect a Creator Expert train: The crocodile comes with a pretty stand so it can also serve as a shelf-show-piece for the aforementioned urban customers; rail cars or even a whole train will have a harder time serving as a show-piece and therefore will largely miss this important customer group. And the train heads with large train layouts in their man-caves are a very wealthy but also very small group, probably too small for TLG to put much effort in. :/

Unfortunately this does not coincide with my reality here: The 45 degree knob is not feasable "plain" nor with @michaelgale's ballasting (due to the curves remaining separate entities). I tried your second point (the "northern" one) but this is off by maybe 1 mm eastwards and least 2 mm northwards. The southern one is more symmetrically off, like 1.5 mm to the north and 1.5 mm to the west. I'd guess that this is due to the track connectors which are pushing the tracks north and east. Take all that with a grain of salt as I did not use any high tech measurement equipment but only bricks and eye balls. Maybe @michaelgale can enlighten us about the "true" geometry of his tracks? Then I could at least rule out that I made some stupid mistake. =) On the other hand, maybe @michaelgale should rather work on his switches and motors. ;)

Ballasting improves the situation quite a bit, but does not resolve the problem entirely: I have ballasted my R72 and put them on MILS, so they are fixated to the ground every 90 degree. You can see the track going down a little bit when a train passes over, but you must look closely at the shadow of the track to realize it. What would be great is a calculation for additional fix points: Where do the (ballasted) track's knobs match those of the underlying base plate, so we can put some additional jumper plates or plates or turn-tables on the ground to fixate the track between the "quarter circle endpoints".

My order just arrived today! We drove an R72 round with a V100 and some wagons and had a ball. Thank you @michaelgale! W00t! :D

The thing is, that w/o DCC, you can only control one train per track at a time, making it inferior (in this regard) to basically all other L-gauge systems (be it TLG or 3rd party). You would have to power a control system like PFx/TLG IR/MK/etc. that are subpar in that they must use another medium of communication than your metal rails. I am thinking more about putting a separate power pickup in every passenger wagon to have working lights in there w/o having a wire run from wagon to wagon. And then of course control them individually via DCC along all the other accessorizes from signals to switch points. I'd expect Michael to make the pickup wheel more like his motor in such that it has an optional DCC controller on board that you can disable via dip switch or something.

Yes, I think for TLG, trains are "a total failure" -- in terms of how much revenue they generate in comparison with their other products. Will they retire it entirely? Eventually yes; but once you let go completely, it is very hard to bring back, so they might drag it on. The market for "LEGO" trains is meanwhile in the hands of third parties: From Big Ben Bricks over FX Bricks, TrixBrix, BrickTracks to BlueBrixx and several Chinese companies. So TLG does have a decent amount of competition in this market segment, making it even less interesting for them. I think they will continue to push licensed products as those have the highest margins and are hardest to compete against -- unlike generic themes like pirates, technic, space or trains. TLGs legal protection has expired for basically everything but minifigures, so the only thing they have left to keep their 30% revenue is Avengers, Batman and Star Wars. Unless some brand gets very popular that builds massively on trains (think Thomas the Train), TLG will not push trains.

Yes! At least as long as the pickup wheel comes with a DCC controller and a PF connector...

None taken! JB just increased their advertised delivery time (for like everything in their shop) to 5 to 7 working days: I very much appreciate that level of honesty! Also my S32 tracks are out for delivery and will probably arrive sometime later today. Well, there needs to be a red motor with red wheels, not just a black one! The only thing I missed on your rig is an anti static wrist strap and something running Linux. But hey: Lasers!! :D

@Toastie I am not trying to complain about having to wait for a week or two; or that I don't get the package flown in immediately. It just occurred to me that JB currently does not meet their own delivery promises for items they do not have in stock (R88), but also for items they do have in stock (S32). And if they have additional challenges on top of the container being late, then I do not expect my pre-order to arrive before october -- which is a bit of a bummer.