The_Cook

LDD file at the link below. I don't know how long the link will remain active so if you're reading this in the far future and it's failing then try PMing me and I'll re-upload. The LDD file is presented as-is, all of the variants of the carriages are present along with the various experiments for windows, seating, alternative table arrangements, etc... I can't make any guarantees that the LDD file is exactly what was built as sometimes brick substitutions need to be made last minute when you realise that the stock you thought you had isn't what you've actually got or a build technique that works in the digital realm doesn't work in the physical world because physics. Enjoy: LDD File

I need to find a new file sharing site after the demise of MocPages. Once I've done that I can post the LDD files.

I somehow got it into my head that I would quite like a rake of BR Mk I Crimson Lake and Cream carriages, the colour scheme being more colloquially know as Blood and Custard. These were intended for play, 6yr old play, on my sons Lego train set so needed to be designed with fairly rough handling in mind. The design criteria of it being playable and compatible with the existing Lego playsets meant that I was looking at a 6 wide carriage, so the carriages from 10194 Emerald Knight seemed a fairly good starting point and whilst Emerald Knight isn't a direct reproduction of a known locomotive, it and the carriages are definitely inspired by British Steam designs from the first half of the 20th Century such as the Gresley designed Pacific locomotive 60103 Flying Scotsman. Initially it started out as a simple recolour of the 10194 carriages, the lower Reddish Brown half became Dark Red, the upper half windows remained Tan, dark brown lining either side of the red lower half. Off to my brick drawers and Bricklink to source the pieces... Except a rake of carriages running up one of the North/South UK mainlines would normally include a Bar, a Kitchen and a Brake Van. Searching Eurobricks for inspiration I was drawn to the Pullman cars of Heppeng and Redimus and they have been an influence on my final designs. The challenge with any interior is fitting it into the 4 wide gap. It is just possible to get the bar squeezed in and to get a Barman serving and a customer standing in the available space. I replaced the back wall of the carriage with solid panels and some 1x3x2 windows as was customary with the Mk1 carriages. However, since the bar only takes up half the carriage something was needed for the remaining half. According to the drawings I found of actual BR Mk I Bar carriages there would have been banquet seating curving round at the carriage ends, which wouldn't be achievable in the 4wide space, so the compromise was to just add a dining table in instead. Which leads to the design of dining tables. I wasn't that happy with the bulky table from 10194 and the strange raised platform it sat on. With the benefit of hindsight I now realise that the platform is to clear the protruding pin from the bogies. I decided I would rather have a full floor so the carriage walls were dismantled down the base, the dark brown 1xX plates are replaced with Dark Brown 2x6 and 2x4 that can support a Dark Blue floor internally. Raising the floor causes a problem in that the minifigures at the bar can't fit beneath the carriage roof if their hairstyle is any larger that the historic 1980's bowl cut. Roof rengineering required, the large curved slopes are replaced with smaller slopes that incorporate a step, this allows slight thinner supporting plates to sit just that little higher. A rim of 1x6 plates provides strength around the edges. The tables themselves turned out not to be as simple as expected. I knew that I didn't want the simplistic tile on a round 2x2, I was after something more refined Ideally with a table lamp. Dark Red Fez's make the ideal lampshades, they get sat atop a transparent round plate and centered on a jumper plate. I wantted to use an inverted 1x3 slope to support the table, but in order to get the legs underneath the tabletop everything needed to be raised by a plate. Various methods were tried, eventually I settled on using a jumper plate to anchor a 2x2 tile and in a number of places that was substituted for jumper plates or modified tiles with studs so that items could be attached to the tables. The tables are actually one concession against playability, in order to get minifigs in and out the tables need to be removed because the minifig legs sit under the table. Not so much of a problem for an AFOL, but to a 6year old it just means the tables get abandonned trackside as getting them back in after putting in the minifigures is fiddly. The seats are on a 6stud repetition. This doesn't neatly fit with the 4 wide windows, whilst the middle table can be aligned with a window those either side align against the pillar between the windows which in turn means that the Lampshades don't fit. Since the nice 4 wide train windows in Tan were only produced for Emerald Night and now fetch astronomical prices on Bricklink a change was in order. I protoyped numerous different variants in LDD, trying 4x3 windows, altering the spacing on the seats, 3x3 windows, 3x3 windows with a 1x1 column in between, even attempting sideways built windows to introduce a transom but that was quickly dismissed and offseting everything by half a stud. In the end 4 wide windows were substituted with 3 wide windows which allows the tables to align with a window rather than a pillar. This required a change to the pillars near the doors which had to become 2 wide and at the same time I susbtituted the inverted slopes for a more robust 1x6 raised arch. The seat positioning gave enough of a gap at one end of the carriange to introduce a 2x3 set of drawers, a working lamp and space for cups and other items. Small 1x2 curved slopes nestle neatly into the arch to give a seamless finish. The challenge for the Kitchen Carriage was to squeezing everything in the kitchen into just 3 studs of space. Even with the constraints the kitchen contains a sink, a cooker, cupboards, implements, serving counter and there is still space for a chef. The remaining half of the carriage gained one and a half tables. The Brake Van was more problematic. The carriages are only 5 bricks high, all of the modern doors tend to be a based around 6 bricks high. I did contemplate trying to brick build the doors but none of the hinge mechanisms were going to work with doors a full brick thick. Scouring Bricklink I found some appropriate doors from 2007 and the Spongebob Squarepants theme, <a href="https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemIn.asp?P=73436c04&in=S">Door 1 x 4 x 5 Left with Reddish Brown Glass</a>, one and only one Bricklink store in the UK had a pair that was quickly acquired! Even with the shorter doors securing them still posed a problem, they couldn't correct directly to the roof because the roof is removable and as soon as it is removed the doors are no longer secured. The fix was to run a layer of grey tiles across the top of the doors to secure them and rebuild the roof to have a small lip to accomodate the raised tiles. I experimented quite a bit with the protruding periscopes that allow the guard to look up the length of the train without having to stick their head out of the window. Eventually I settled on 1x2x2/3 slopes in Dark Red either side of a Trans-Clear Plate with Dark Red Tile on Top. Then it was the turn of the doors. They had originally been built with a Tan upper and Dark Red lower but the lack of the Dark Brown banding following through into the doors started to annoy me so they needed to be changed as well. the ideal would have been to use a plate with vertical clip in Dark Brown but since that part doesn't exist in that colour and I don't have the luxury of owning the moulding machines I ended up using a V-clip in Dark Red sandwiched between two 1x3 plates. I could have just shifted the 1x1 brick with bar handle down below the Dark Brown plate but it would have been unsupported at the bottom and given the play that the doors get I wasn't happy with such a fragile solution hence the use of plates with v-clips. The full rake of 6 coaches comprises of: first, bar, first, kitchen, first, brake. That seems to be the maximum that the locomotives I currently have can handle at reasonable speeds and without wheelslip. I'm experimenting with using the <a href="https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=73090b">Brick, Modified 2 x 6 x 2 Weight</a> to add weight to locomotives to improve traction. Fresh batteries also help, as well as persuading my 6yr old son that if he wants to learn to drive a real train he need to learn to accelerate <i>slowly</i>. What it's missing is some 2nd class carriages... I have some more 6x28 bases on order, I've should have enough bricks. Prototyped in LDD, I remove the table, move the seats closer together and the carriage now fits 8 seats. The seats don't line up with the 3x3 windows so they come out in favour of the old 4x3 windows that I'd decided against on the first class carriages earlier. Some columns allow to align the windows with the seats. I experiment with putting an arch across part way through the carriage, an attempt at a semi-open as it were. However I realise upon placing minifigs into the carriage that their heads are going to clash with the arch so I remove it in favour of a discrete light fitting. Then I have second thoughts, I remove the dark blue floor and lower the chairs by a plate so that the minifigs fit beneath the arch. Experimentation occurs with the tables, I start with black 1x1 bricks topped with a white tile, a smaller version of the tables from the first class carriages but it feels a little too classy for second class so I eventually opt for using dark brown plates jutting out of the carriage side. I feel the simpler look looks better. If the rake of the carriages is rebuilt to be first, kitchen, first, first, bar, second,second, brake then the passenger section of the brake and potentially the bar could do with being rebuilt to 2nd class standards. In order to squeeze 4 seats into the brake carriage it would be necessary to move the luggage compartment doors back by a stud which requires some rethinking about the periscope attachment. It's Not an impossible task, but I'm fairly certain that it'll be another brick order to get the relevant SNOT bricks. What it needs now is a either a decent 4-6-2 pulling it or a Class 55... In the absence of those I'm left with the Green Locomotive from 60198. With a rake of 8 carriages behind it, it struggles. Accelerate too fast and there's a lot of wheel-slip. So the Green Locomotive needs modification. I try adding weight in terms of the old weight bricks from the lego boats, some improvement. Next attempt is to use a second motor bogie, I need to use PyBricks to invert the outputs of the hub and to bind the remote so that one control controls both outputs, the control logic is validated on a short 5 segment test track and works as expected. It needs a proper loop of track to be able to get the full 8 coach train set up behind it. Then I realise that none of my stations have platforms nearly long enough for a consist of 8 carriages... A massive station rebuilding program is required!

The Lego connection protocol seems to be able to choose a different colour for the different pairings. I have no inisght into whether that is done by assessing what is already paired nearby, or whether it's just some form of hashing on the identifier of the underlying bluetooth channel to generate a number from that can be mapped to a colour. Obviously, if there are enough hubs present then at some point the colors will have to be reused. I'll see if @Pybricks has anything to add, then I might just have to take the path of least resistance and hard-code the colours. Easy enough to set green for the green train, yellow for the yellow train.

I understand that I can just set it, but the whole point about asking if the remote LED colour is readable is that the connection process chooses a colour to display on both the remote and the hub so that small children can see which remote is paired to which hub. I want to replicate that original default behaviour, for the benefit of a small child that is used to the colours matching. To do that I need to know which colour the remote and hub have negotiated for each other and is displayed on the remote, then I can set the hub accordingly. I could just create a different python program for each hub in each train with a unique colour set to both remote and hub in each one. It would work but it's a brute force solution rather than the elegance of using information from the existing pairing code that is already present in both remote and hub.

No, I haven't chosen the color for the remote, the remote has chosen a colour, perhaps based on whatever Bluetooth channel the remote and hub have negotiated for each other. That's why I'm interested in whether the current state of LED in the remote can be read, so that I can set the hub to the same value. I had a quick dig around the git-hub source but whilst I can see the Python that provides the forward facing interface for the various hubs, remotes and motors, I could immediately see any code to link the interface to whatever's going on underneath. Again, I'll fully admit that I was poking around and might not have poked into the right files or might not have realised that a certain bit of syntax links back to underlying code already existing in the various devices.

I get that bit. There will always be the "double click" to start the hub and then start the python program to then pair with the remote. On a default Lego firmware once the pairing has occured the Hub and Remote both show the same color of LED. Pybricks defaults to Blue initially, Green once running, but the LED is changeable so if I can get the colour that the remote has chosen then I can set the LED on the hub to that colour but I don't know if it's possible to interrogate the remote to find out which colour it's chosen and displaying.

Does anyone know if it's possible to replicate the LED colour matching that happens when a standard Lego Remote and City Hub pair together? I can't see anything obvious in the documentation that describes how to get the color from the Remote so that I could set the LED on the Hub accordingly. Python isn't my coding language of choice, so apologies if I'm missing something inherent in the language such as "remote.light" simply being the accessor to get at the color information. Reason being is that I've rebuilt the Green Loco from 60198 to contain 2 motors and I therefore need PyBricks to invert Port B so that all the wheels turn in the right direction. I want it to behave as close to the standard Lego mechanisms as possible for the benefit of my 7year old son. He looks to the LEDs on the remote and the hub to see which are pair together hence wanting the colors to match.

The goat will be done Friends style... I'll never forget the buzz around Elves and everyone wanting it to be Middle Earth Minifigures and I joked at the time that it would be Friends... ...it was a good theme but not the Eleven minifigures that the historic forums desired.

Good point Thorsten. All I'm trying to do is mimic the functionality of the Bogie motors in a standard motor. I've no idea whether that's working on power or speed, I'm guessing the former as it's simpler but more informed people might know otherwise. After some fiddling I got PyBricks uploaded onto the hub. There was one piece of user-interface where it wasn't obvious that I needed to click on "Lego Bootloader" to actually start the pairing process, I somewhat assumed that would just be happening. Python ins't my preferred language of choice, I'm an old-skool embedded C/C++ and ARM assembler programmer, but I can make it work as it's all fairly simple button press adjusts variable, variable sets motor power coding to begin with.

It looks like PyBricks is the way to go. It's not a search term I would have happened upon by chance, so thanks to all for the responses. I have two of the WeDo 2.0 Medium motor 21980 and as far as I can tell they're on/off.

Apologies if this is answered elsewhere but I couldn't invoke to right search terms to find it if it is. I've got a number of Powered Up Hubs and Handsets from the modern train systems such as 60197 Passenger Train. The bogies supplied with the set Motor no 4 have speed control so the trains can go faster or slower. Do any of the other technic motors with the appropriate LPF2 connector have similar speed control? I've got both a PUP Medium and a Boost External and they both appear to be just On/Off. Conversely is there something I can do with the hub so that it speed controls the motors? The context is that I'm in the process of building up some Steam Locomotives so the bogie motors aren't suitable but I'd still like speed control.

2 years being the average design cycle for TLG products, so makes sense, particularly with something as complex as a Technic set. Suggestions dropped into the box today might be with us in 2025.

Slowly working my way through building this; a couple of notes about the instructions: Step 40-41 - I found it hard to spot where the 1x1's were going, they'd be better in a step on their own. Step 196 - The 1:1 callout shows a 5xale but the diagram looks to be a 6 axle. I'm assuming a 6axle given that track is 6wide. Step 198 - Again, 1:1 callout shows a 5 axle but the diagram looks to be a 6 axle. Step 199 - Where does the black 2x2 plate go? I assumed it was under the 4x8 plate as there's a 2x2 space there and the other 1x2 technic bricks all have 2x2 plates atop them. Step 201 - It wasn't immediately clear that the 3off black 1x4 plates go underneath, it might need one more step on the sub-assembly to illustrate that properly Step 204 - I think the pin and pin/axle are the wrong way around to accept the L shaped liftarms a step or two later. Not difficult to work out and fix, but I went back to double-check that I hadn't got it wrong. Step 207-209 - Ordering here is wrong, the L liftarms of step 209 need to have gone on earlier, otherwise the bluish-grey 1x1s of 207 block them. Part 3065 - A 1x2 without pin in yellow. I couldn't work out where it was needed; everything could have been done with a standard 3004 1x2 with pin. Is this a case of the wrong brick picked by mistake in the digital tooling? I know that's something I've done before. I'm still only about halfway through and running slightly out of order due to bricks I thought I'd ordered not being in the order, so there may be more later. Putting together the instructions for something like this must be a Herculean task, take the above as constructive improvements rather than complaint. It's been great fun so far.

The modern duplo track geometry is all based around hexagons. A straight connects opposite sides of a hexagon. A curve connects to an adjacent side plus one; not sure how to describe that better without resorting to pictures. The advantage of hexagons is that the tesselate nicely and thus all the lengths are consistent. If you have 45degree curves (which I think the original duplo track system did) you end up needing strange lengths (probably factors or sqrt(2)) to make things fit and unlike Brio which has slack in it's connections, Duplo is too precise as fit. Lego must have decided that avoiding odd lengths was worse than forcing children to thing in hexagons!

Next up is Market By The Wall. This one is an interesting creation in that it's not entirely original; it's a Classic Castleification of 7571: The Fight for the Dagger. The overall structure remains the same, it's converted to stone grey, the roof is standard classic castle courtesy of 6076 Black Falcons Fortress, there are attachment points to add it to the wall. The backside isn't that exciting but you can see the double doors leading outside the wall. I think it fits quite nicely into the wall, shown here attached to Merchants House and the Guild Hall (more on that in a future post) The perpendicular wall and awnings creates some depth to the things attached to the wall and market stalls are another way to move stuff out from the wall into the interior space. Hmm, I'm fairly sure that I didn't break that one up but it wasn't in the box that I photographed... ...I'll have to go diving back into the attic to try and find that one ;-)

It looks like there is a Technic, Axle and Pin Connector Perpendicular Double Split connected to the liftarm and then Technic, Axle Connector Double - Flexible Rubber to connect the aforementioned connectors together into a chain. Sushi belts work because of the curves sliding across each other, something that is going to be hard to mimic with Lego pieces.

Very, very clever. The one ball that goes against the other 3 never passes through the middles of the sides, so you could craft an insert/extract point there to turn it into a GBC mechanism that utilises the 3 ball path. Reliability could be challenging in an exhibition setting but I'm fairly certain that it would get a lot of attention as people try to understand the mechanism.

The fourth set published was "The Stable", born out of the observation that I had lots of horses but nowhere for them to stay. Design wise the starting point was a hinged wall similar to 6062 Siege Tower, but I needed a little extra width to accomodate the stalls for the horses so and extra 2 studs was inserted into the center of the wall. There's a little bit of complexity in order to allow the parapet of the hinged section to fold against the side of the stable, but it's nothing more exciting that offseting the horse stalls by a stud. The intended minifigs were a stable-hand, who is present in my photo's, another soldier who is not present and two horses. It's consistent with the other sets, in the above image from left to right is 6067 Guarded Inn, The Stable, Market By The Wall (which will be the next post) and the wall from 6062 Battering Ram.

Lego have been doing study groups for over 40 years, it's just that it's usually with children who don't go talking about it on the Interwebs. Usually the study groups are with concept images and prototype sets. This is known from various interviews with TLG designers over the years and is also explicitly mentioned in Daniel Konstanski's excellent The Secret Life Of Lego Bricks. It's quite conceivable that the survey was done with prototype models to gain insight, should there be sufficient interest then those prototype models would need to be turned into production sets, the peer review, instruction generation and manufacturing and packing processes taking a non-trivial amount of time to complete.

Defending The Breach wa s intended to be deliberately simple; reminiscent of 6040 Blacksmith Shop or 6041 Armor Shop, slight bigger than an impulse purchase but not a candidate for the Christmas List. The idea for the storyline behind this one was that the breach in the wall needed to be defended since it forms a weak point in the wall. The design entailed the construction of a ruined piece of wall with a timber pallisade behind. The log panels are an anachronism, they didn't arrive until the Western Theme in the mid-90's, but being old-brown they don't look out of place. Looking back at this retrospectively the pallisade was securely attached to the ruined wall, if I built it again I'd probably try to contrive the pallisade to break-away to increase the playability. My original design has 2 defenders, 2 attackers. The defenders were still attached when I came to re-photograph it, but the attackers had been returned to the bag of Lion Knights and missed out. At just 117 pieces it's in line with 6041, the modern equivalent (still over 10 years old!) would be 7187 Escape from the Dragon's Prison.

Merchant's House was the second MOC, again follow the link for the full backstory to how it was designed. The inspiration was the the righthand side of 6086 Black Knight's Castle, the raised baseplate being replaced with a section of classic wall. The roof was remodelled to be two sided and there's an obvious colour change from the red of 6086 to black, the roof fit better with the black rooves of 6067 Guarded Inn, and 6074 Black Falcon's Fortress. The wall itself incorporated a gated storage chamber, hence the name Merchant's house, to accomodate the living space above; although I'm sure it could be repurposed for a dungeon, the beauty of 80's plays was that you had to make your own stories. The living space interior was sparse, a table and goblets which matches 6086 Black Knight's Castle and is signifcantly more than 6074 Black Falcon's Castle. The final design detail borrowed from 6086 Black Knight's Castle is the escape ramp / sally port. Consistency with other sets is fairly good, seen here alongside 6040 Blacksmith Shop. Indeed it was the smaller sets lik 6040 Blacksmith Shop and the "life" that they embedded into the walls that was a driving force behind many of the sets. The height is nice, from the outside a long stretch of wall can be quite boring, the height and offset break up long stretches of wall. The downside however is that it's not articulated, it needs to be combined with an articulated piece of wall to insert it into one of the existing castles, however this is a criticism that could be levelled at several of the sets, 6067 Guarded Inn and 6040 Blacksmith shop included. The doors are an anachronism, and the wrong shade of grey! The old 4611 Door 1x6x7 Barred would have been too tall, a frustration that I remember from my childhood, the piece and it's doorframe don't match the castle wall panels. The modern 60621 Door 1 x 4 x 6 Barred with Stud Handle didn't arrive until 2008 and has never been produced in old grey, the only "old" colour that it comes in is black which I didn't have in my brick collection at the point when I was putting this set together otherwise I would have substituted. I didn't have the minifigs to hand when recapturing the photo's but there were originally two guards, a wolfpack thief and a merchant. That felt like enough to act out some interesting play. Total parts after minifigs are added was around 240, which is similar to 6067 Guarded Inn.

Having returned from my Dark Ages I had a hankering to build castles, as a child I'd had 6080 amongst others so it was a theme I was familiar with. I also wantted to create MOCs that looked as if the could have come from the Lego Design Studio, they needed to follow the historic design rules and most importantly be buildable. For all of the sets I was always thinking in terms of Story, Playability, Build-ability, Cost and Consistency, think like a product designer. It started with The Maiden's Tower, follow the link to get the backstory, I'll summarise here. I had 6074 Black Falcons Fortress and 6067 Guarded Inn and wantted to connect them together but because Guarded Inn isn't articulate you can't. Therefore I needed a corner piece. One of the common fantasy tropes is "The maiden in the tower" so I thought that would make a good starting point for a design. The timber panels are a nod towards 6067 Guarded Inn, the roof is inspired by the roof used in 6074 Black Falcons Fortress. The stairs at the back given access to the parapet, a feature lacking in many of the official castle builds. The steps are an anachronism as the part wasn't created until 1996 for the Western Theme and didn't appear in old brown until 2002 with the first Star Wars and Harry Potter sets. The torch is a small thing I always do, space-blaster with red and yellow rounds ontop. I don't remember whether I've inherited it from an official set, but they occur in most of my builds. From memory I originally had a Maiden figure in the tower, a Black Falcon on the Parapet and a Lion Kight on Horseback. I thought that that was more than enough to be able to re-enact the knight rescuing the maiden. The minifigs have returned to the box of minifigs and I didn't have time to find them, so most of the builds will be shown without minifigs. The tricky part is getting the Maiden into the tower, with hindsight the modern technique of easily removable roofs could have worked quite nicely here. Personally, I think it sits quite nicely alongside the Guarded Inn. The design aesthetic matches, nothing looks out of place. At 200 parts, including minifigs, it's 1986 equivalent would be 6061 Siege Tower from a price comparisson standpoint, which was a whole $17.50 according to Brickset.

About 10 years ago I created a set of MOCs in the classic (80's) castle style and posted them up here on Eurobricks, you can still find the orginal posts by searching for "Retro MOC" in post titles. At the time all of images were posted on MOCPages but that site has now gone and the images with it. Recently there have been a few requests for me to repost some of the MOCs. Unfortunately I can't find the original pictures any more, they're probably on an SD card somewhere, but where that SD card is I don't have a clue. Thankfully old MOCs don't die, they get boxed up, I just need to find the box... Historic Castle, that looks hopeful! Alas, it's Trolltown which I am still slowly (very slowly) extending. There are a couple of 6057 Sea Serpent and my Classic Castle variant of 6277 Imperial Trading Post appears to be buried at the bottom but it's mostly Trolls. A suspicious box lurking deep in the eaves of the roof... That looks more hopeful, I can instantly see the Maiden's Tower and the Hilltop Tower. All I need do is extract the box from where its buried... Success. They're out, I can re-photograph them. Time hasn't necessarily been kind to the MOCs, the dust I can deal with but the Old Grey has browned in many instances. Still, there's enough that if I repost to this thread every few days there's a few week's worth of content some of which might not have been posted here before.

They were shared on the now defunct MocPages which was the image repository, hence the images here not being present. I haven't been able to find my old photo's, they're possibly on a dead harddrive or an SD card lost to the back of a drawer. However, over the holiday period I dragged the old models (they're still extant) out and re-photographed them. Later this week I'll start a "RetroMOC Archaeology" post and go back across all the models I have, as there was interest from elsewhere that they get posted. If anyone can suggest a suitable repository for the LDD files then I can repost those as well.