Frank STENGEL

Looking better and better. Is the design supposed to look like an existing swiss train station? I am asking since the rolling stock (and the name ) are swiss...

If you want to compute the scale your lego train ends up as you can use that converter. As it turns out, the standard leco scale is somewere around 1:42. That means that the standard Lego trains are narrow and the rails very wide. To build trains that are somehow to scale one ends up with engines that are 8 studs wide and rolling stock that is 7-8 wide. Still, this results in trains that have a very wide wheel base. If one uses the rail width as a base, one ends up with a scale of 1:30 and a rolling stock that is about 10 wide. At that scale, the minifigs are rather small people (less that 150 cm or 5 feet) Anyway, the main problem remains curve radii: Lego rails have a ludicrously small turn radius... In my (rather uninformed) opinion trying to build to an exact scale is bound to failure. However building and keeping the proportions right while having the train run through curves is a fun challenge...

Ah well, unless you are into modern art you don't loose much . That said your design is a strong case for convergent evolution

Interesting. Vaguely reminds me of this building...

Fun!

I second that advice. Steamers are basically in two parts: bottom (chassis, wheels, rods and pistons) and top (boiler, cabin etc.). Each part has its own challenges. For the wheel chassis side you have to pay attention to curve handling. That can be rather difficult when the piston/cylinder interfere with mobile front wheel arrangements. E.g. in a 4-x-x you often have one wheel pair before and one wheel pair after the cylinders. One trick is to have only the front pair mobile while the second pair is fixed (with respect to the chassis), another (which complicates the rod mechanisms) is to build the cylinders on the front truck rather than the chassis... For the superstructure, unless you build a push along engine (or one using a motorised tender) you are in for another challenge: how to cram (hide!) motor(s), receiver and battery inside the boiler and cabin. Searching on brickshelf using "steam" as a keyword results in tons of ideas and LDraw files...

Indeed, having a blind driver in the middle is not as aesthetically pleasing as having a flanged driver. However, once the locomotive chassis is built one has to look closely in order to see which wheel is blind/flanged. It really is a question of aesthetics versus simplicity. Having a middle flanged wheel will force you to have a shifting axle and rod attachment. That can be very tricky.

It looks small... A PF motorization will be difficult. What you could do is keep it push along and build a motor/battery/IR freight wagon... Don't forget to put a blind driver.

Well, the green was just so that when designing I could have a better idea of what I was doing: one colour = one block... The actual colours of the locomotive were (milk)chocolate brown for those that ran on the "nord" network (they were the first produced), black with gold trimmings (hard to do with stickers) for the "ceinture" and "est" ones and, starting in 1938, dark green with golden trimmings on the tanks and black for the boiler. I am going for a variation on the "est" livery. All had red buffer beams. I'll have to sticker up... Fore some nice models and an idea of the actual colour schemes see there and there... While researching for the locomotive, I found that there were four different variants according to wether there was a tank above the boiler and wether that tank was simple (and fat), double or triple. Worse, nowhere could I find an explanation for what that tank was for. Any ideas? By real, do you mean the "all in one" lego ones (brick link parts 4022, 91968c01 etc)? Curves, S-curves and points: no problem whatsoever. It actually runs with three trucks 060+040+060 the centre one sliding (in UIC style it would be classified as something like C+2+C). I'll post a video asap...

Still a WIP, but we are getting there... See the pictures: Now for some detailing... By the way, for the buffers, which of the front or the rear look better?

Guilty as charged. Honestly, I prefer the brown tracks over the gray ones for steam. They look more like old times tracks with rusty rails and wooden sleepers like these (thank wiki!): I use the gray ones for more moder trains...

Well they are finished... I have made a complete train with them: BR64+AB3yge+B3yge+Ghs31... There is a brickshelf galley to see the whole gizmo...

Beyond amazing I wish I had your eye for detail

Weird, my wife said exactly the same!

Sorry if this has already been covered. As I was toying with my du Bousquet locomotive, I discovered I wanted/needed a lot of 3mm rigid hose and/or bar and that I was going to mod it by bending and stretching it... Seeing the price and rarity of these parts, I started looking for an alternative. While poking around my tool collection I had an idea: rigid electric cable. As it turns 2,5mm2 (including sheath) cable has just the right diametre (my callipers say 3,1mm) can be bent, comes in lovely colours (if one is colour blind that is) and is dirt cheap (around 0,005 €/stud)!

Beware! Check the temperature of your oven and stay there to be able to act quick! As previously stated ABS starts melting at about 105 °C. I just made the bitter experience. I had wanted to go faster and heated the oven to 110 °C. Result : a totally shrunk piece of plastic ready for the bin (or to be used for modding !)

Just a question to know how one creates trains. Personally I tend to use a CAD program to start a more or less rough outline of the loc/wagon I am building, then do mock-ups of certain key parts (chassis, gear mechanisms etc) go back to the drawing board, to get to the point where the thing looks like what I want. The hard/long part comes next: ordering parts, building the loc/wagon, changing (the many) details that don't work, order more parts etc. How do you proceed?

Another question: what are you using to model the various steam/air/water pipes? I can see some 3 mm rigid hose, but for the rest, I can only imagine some heavy DIYing... The more I look the more I learn. Your piston design is much simpler and more effective than any I saw... There is nor rod that gets stuck inside the cylinder!

Amazing! I wish I could be as accurate in detailing A question though: are the thingies holding the modified bars/antennas on the boiler mini fig hands?

Breathtaking! I wish I could be as painstakingly precise as you ...

While tinkering with my three axle coaches, I started looking for something different and I fell on this: Two articulated trucks giving it a 0-6-2+2-6-0 (or 031-130 à la French) wheel arrangement. Quite an interesting oldie isn't she? So here I am thinking I could build the beast. After looking the measures the thing would be 39 studs long in 8 wide and about 10 bricks high. For practicality purposes, I am changing the wheel arrangement into 0-6-0+4+0-6-0, with the centre truck sliding under the body (I will use a similar system as the one on my three axle coaches) The motor trucks are finished (I'll post a photo asap). Here is a picture showing the current stat of things (the colours aren't the final ones; I am using these to separate the different parts): It is going to be a twin medium PF motors, IR controlled locomotive. The battery will be a Lipo hidden in front of the front motor...

Actually, I tried this. It did not work: the water cooled too fast for it to properly heat the rather large parts.

Amazing ; marvelously detailed . What scale would it be? As far as I can tell it must be 20-22 wide (if not more) and has a track width of 10-12

I don't remember: 5 to 10 minutes...

Just one thing: keep a constant eye on the parts. You want to be able to take them out of the oven before they are overcooked I had a chair in front of the oven which had my wife wondering what paint I was watching dry