Locomotive Annie

Yesterday I wasn't feeling well at all so rather than lie in bed and be miserable I decided to see if I could give myself a Lego project to take my mind off it. I've always been fascinated by the Ewings System steam monorail locos, the most famous and well known being the surviving and fully operational locomotive that formerly belonged to the Patiala State Monorail Trainways. When I dreamed up the Kotanga Tramway back when I was still modelling in 16mm scale I started to build a Ewings System loco for the Kotanga Valley Posthole Co. for working trains to and from the posthole mine. Only I got too clever and managed to work myself into a corner with the model and it's still sitting in its box awaiting the day when I might feel inspired enough solve to its problems and finish it. For this loco though I decided to move away from building a loco with a spindly and lightweight appearance and build something fairly chunky that looked like it was used on a mining company branchline. On completion I discovered that I'd built myself a 15 wide loco, but one that seemed to be quite nicely balanced over its double flanged wheels. Oh and I cheated because I originally built it as an 0-3-0, only I couldn't get sufficient sideplay to allow it to negotiate Lego 12volt curved rails so I took the centre wheel out and left the axle and outside cranks in place. It's just about impossible to see if the centre driving wheel is there or not when the loco is sitting on the track so I'm not going to worry about it. This is the wheel that I used as driving wheels...... http://www.bricklink...Item.asp?P=2994 I found that I could fit two thin section O rings into the groove between the two flanges without raising the flanges too high relative to the rail head. I did try a single thicker O ring first, but this was nowhere near as effective as the two thin section O rings. A 4.5volt motor lives in the wider sidetank and drives through a worm gear to a two stage drive to the rear driving axle. The final drive gear is visible as I wanted to represent a geared type locomotive with the cylinders somewhere in the cab which has the added benefit of not having to fit connecting rods and visible cylinders in the traditional place. The loco is pretty much complete now apart from having to sort out some spacers for the coupling rod pins, but while I was building it I was having real problems finding enough 1x2 black bricks as well as black slope pieces for the boiler. I know I've only recently built five black steam locos all with classic Lego octagonal boilers, but I'm sure I had more bricks that that. Oh well, time to put in an order for more bricks (sigh).....

Yes that does look much better UE. The bumblebee colour scheme looks great.

Congratulations on your successful test run

Oh now I do like what you've done with modding the Emerald Night. I always thought it looked far too overboilered to properly represent many of the larger UK express steam locomotives. Great to see all the colour variations too, I particularly like the red and the blue versions.

Ooooo that's the holy grail of all Lego train folk, - a large empty room that nobody wants to claim for a more mundane purpose Don't forget that we like to see pictures once you've got everything set up. Oh and welcome to the forum too

Ha ha, that reference to the valley that nobody can find was put there by me when I was still intending to build a Kotanga layout in 16mm scale. Kotanga is a completely made up place, but much of the background for it comes from the Hauraki District where I live as well as the surrounding Thames, Coromandel and Waikato districts. There were a good many tramways serving the logging and gold mining industry and interfacing with the river shipping trade as well as interesting branchline railways in this area back in the 1900s so it's a rich source of inspiration. The original idea behind Kotanga was that it is a strange and somewhat mystical place with unusual localised concentrations of magnetic energy which cause such effects as the trees growing with a strangely curved shape which makes the wood ideal for making wooden coathangers of superior quality. The posthole mine is also a result of these strange anomalies, - and yes I will be printing up stickers for the boxes the ready to use postholes are packed in. It's all great fun and helps me to not take my brick based railway modelling too seriously. Once I've completed the main Kotanga station baseboard I will be moving onto the township baseboards and hopefully I will be able to at least represent a part of the coathanger factory. Unfortunately I won't be able to model the posthole mine or the sawmill as I simply won't have the space for them. Even though my house is my own and I don't have to answer to anybody for what I do with it, it still might be a bit much if I push the trackwork for the Kotanga Tramway beyond my bedroom and into the rest of the house. The designer says that he drew inspiration from the Disneyland station for Queens Bridge, but you are quite right it's a great looking station. I always like to buy the instructions if I'm going to use someone's original design. I think that's only fair since they've gone to all the trouble of developing the design for the building and making sure that it does indeed fit together as it should. It's likely that I will be changing the colour scheme and making minor alterations here and there, but essentially this is going to be the new Kotanga station.

The new school set is one I've put on my list, but I notice that Lego haven't solved the problem with the Friends minidolls not being able to grip the handlebars on the Lego bicycles. The 'Friends' young ladies on my layout are forever getting told off by the local police for riding their bicycles hands off.

http://www.brickbuil...n-instructions/ My original plan for Kotanga station was to build something fairly modest, but as time has gone on I've decided to develop the township beyond the baseboard I'm working on at present and build most of it on the adjoining baseboard. This means that I would now have room to have a goods yard as well as the loco shed and it's adjoining turntable, - AND also a proper railway station of an appropriately dignified appearance. I'd seen the Queen's Bridge station on the brickbuilderspro website a while ago and fell in love with its Victorian era appearance almost straight away. I kept telling myself that it was far too posh for Kotanga, but on the other hand some fairly significant industries operated out of Kotanga in the past with the sawmill, the coathanger factory and the post hole mine being the main ones. And of course there was the Summer tourist trade and gold mining as well. Soooooo I've come to the conclusion that a posh station was built at Kotanga afterall by the very well heeled county council of the time and later on when the NZ Government Railways took over the district's railway lines, all except for the Kotanga Tramway (because it was such a scruffy little concern back then), the glorious Victorian style station building continued in use and remains today as a completely unique relic of the Kotanga County's colourful past. While I like shunting a goods yard and doing all the 'on shed' locomotive movements before a loco begins its working day, I also like to run passenger trains. And with running passenger trains you have to have a decent looking station for them to stop at; - especially if they happen to be posh looking trains and possibly even express trains. So there you are that's how I decided that Kotanga will be getting such a nice station building even though it shouldn't really. Out of interest has anyone built this particular station before? It's supposed to fit on three 32x32 baseplates which happens to be as big as I could go with on the intended site anyway.

I love the diligent minifigs hard at work making sure everything is functioning correctly.

That's almost similar to LNER Apple Green which was the colour that the A1/A3 Pacifics had as their original livery.

Cool, I forgot that one. At last a use for those BBB XL blind driving wheels I've got. Don't forget the Ewings system monorail too......... Before I became completely distracted by Lego I was building a modified Ewings system loco in 16mm scale. It would most certainly qualify for the Wacky and Weird Challenge http://gardenrails.m..._t__t_6153.html

This sort of thing

Yes you can't beat the look of semaphore arms that actually move That rubber band drive is really clever and I like the whole sturdy design of the signal bridge. Anything involving electronics and logic systems is completely out of my league, though if I asked my computer science graduate daughter to explain it to me I'm sure she would and she would even draw up a schematic for me if I asked. However whenever I've had signaling systems before on other layouts I always did it with mechanical rodding, moveable contacts and ex-post office telephone exchange relays. Semaphore signals are on the 'to-do' list for the Kotanga Tramway, but I haven't got as far as devising how they might work yet.

Cool! I really like that.

That's Ok Zephyr, it was a useful reminder as I'd forgotten about doing some UV track tests and I really should if I'm going ahead with a garden line at some stage. I'd had a think too about whether or not it's a good idea to have removable track panels that could be brought inside for storage and I decided that with my balance issues and health problems it would be better to have the track permanently in place and use lightweight covers that can be laid over the track when it's not in use.

Wonderful! The things you can learn from Lego; - I didn't know that there were such things as river petrol stations until I saw this thread

My word that's a blast from the past, - it must be years ago since I saw the Godfather movies. A great recreation and the two cars are magnificent.

Wow! that is such an inspired piece of brick engineering. Wonderful to see a video of it all working too, - thank you very much for sharing this.

I haven't completely given up on my own dreams of brick railways in the garden as my indoor layout is taking shape as a 12volt railway and I still own a considerable amount of RC and PF type track. Plainly my 12volt locos will be staying indoors, but I also own RC locos and now a PF locomotive as well so it would be good to have somewhere for them to stretch their legs. The site I'd picked out for my outdoor line doesn't get much direct sunlight at all. Possibly in the very late afternoon during Summer would be the peak sunlight time and then only for a short while. The site is also right beside my garage workshop so it would be fairly simple to run a branch track into the garage with storage sidings to make it easy to store rolling stock without too many problems. Earlier on in this thread mention was made of 'Trex' which is a plastic and wood composite material which can be purchased in standard lumber sizes and this was what I'd made up my mind to use to create my baseboards for laying track on. It's weatherproof and it doesn't rot as well as being reasonably priced so it's ideal for the purpose really. I should really setup that test board of sacrificial track that Zephyr mentioned. I was going to do it at the beginning of our Summer, only I got ill (again!) and it never got done. We're moving into late Autumn here at the moment, but I suppose it doesn't really matter when the test actually begins just so long as the results are regularly and systematically recorded.

Oh I see my mistake now, I thought the vacuum cleaner was blowing the flywheel to make it turn not actually providing 'steam' pressure to run the engine. Wow that's amazing, I didn't think that building such engines was possible in Lego.

I didn't know there was a polarity switch available so thanks for this information. With my own project I tried having both bogies pointing in the same direction and found that there always seemed to be problems with the cable on one of the bogies limiting movement. Not being terribly keen on having to undertake solder and splice surgery on the built in wiring cables means that this switch could be the ideal solution provided I can get it to fit.

Amazing! - a windmill powered air pump. I'm completely sure it fits the title of the challenge in every way ES.

If it's a trackside structure it belongs with Trains far more than it belongs to Town.

Wow that is so cool So many details on such a small model. Welcome to Eurobricks from me too.

Sorry I've been ill for most of the time since this thread was current and my garden railway experiments never went any further.