Locomotive Annie

It's brilliant seeing the classic town sets. Sometimes with the move to SNOT and a more realistic style of building it's easy to forget just how appealing these older sets were.

What a great uncoupling system. No good for the old 12volt system of course, but I can see this design being taken up by AFOL train folk everywhere and your name being put up there with the great innovators of the hobby.

Very impressive seeing them all together like that.

I remember seeing that method of building track when I was still messing about with 'G' scale and I thought it was really clever.

Great design for a platform CamelBoy. I'm about to start building a station so your design for a modular platform has come at just the right time.

Both the Type 17 and the Type 2 are great models, thank you for showing them to us.

Great to see this loco in it's completed form

Great to see this loco in the bricks. It makes for a very impressive model and an encouragement for me to make a start on my own one.

Speaking for myself I use a certain amount of clone bricks because firstly my sole income is from an Invalid pension so I don't have much money, and in this part of the world it's actually easier to buy the clones than it is to buy Lego. Enlighten make some really useful train parts that Lego doesn't make anymore, or never made at all and in addition to that the quality of their bricks is at least 90% that of Lego. Sure some of the clone makers are still pushing not very well made bricks with poor clutch, but the majority are steadily upping their game and it's getting hard to find a reason to poke fun at them or to dismiss their products out of hand. Lecture over (grrrr, snarl........ )

Yes LT, your service station looks much better with the change over to two baseplates. Will your service station eventually become a part of New Mannum or do you have other plans for it?

Incredible, with some of the photos it was hard to tell if I was looking at a model or the real thing.

I have four Police officers and two Police motorbikes (the third officer remains hopeful that the Police budget might cough up another motorcycle sometime soon) as well as a Police van. My town is very small and the citizens are well behaved so most of the time members of the town Police can be found hanging around the local cafe endangering their health with too many doughnuts. One day I will build a Police station for them, but until then the cafe seems to be filling out that role.

dgoodfellow, I like the look of your SNOT roads and can see that they are a much more flexible system than the standard road plates. Your whole town looks great too and is something that both you and your daughter can be very proud off.

Jaw droppingly brilliant! An amazing technical achievement; - now all that needs to be done is to devise a way to actually get the minifigs to board the train. And I must say that the city street above the station is really great too.

Yes that's exactly the kind of thing that I meant, your station would look amazing with a roof like that one. Ha ha yes I must agree Hrw-Amen, the Horizon Express looks like it's about to beat up on the poor old station building

Wow! that is some bridge.

I agree, the work of a master.

That's a really great looking station and I like your adaptation of the 2150 design. I agree, those windows need to be changed for grey ones, but apart from that your station is excellent. I love the long platforms, but I do wonder if you might need some kind of canopy roof to cover those platforms to keep your minifigs nice and dry should it rain.

That's a clever way to get a long length of run cheaply alright, but I would imagine you would need a table saw setup that would give you fine accurate cuts to make it work successfully.

If you have any doubts about what's possible with 'L' Gauge check out Carl Greatriix's models on Flickr. I do understand what you mean about the richness of detail with the current crop of H0 rtr models, even with the latest British 00 rtr models the standard of detail is way beyond anything even the best scratch-builders can achieve; - and I should know since I did used to scratch-build to finescale standards when I was a much younger woman than I am now. Lego trains are just plain good fun. I like to build New Zealand steam locos and what I like best is that any loco I build can continue to evolve as I learn better techniques or get newly inspired on how some detail might be represented. Unlike a teardown rebuild with a traditional scratch-build a teardown rebuild with a Lego loco is relatively painless and can be completed in an hour or two. I had a good friend in the British 'S' Scale Society who spent the best part of a year researching and building a particular Edwardian era loco in nickle silver to a very high standard only to have it destroyed by a careless accident caused by another society member at a train show. I know for a fact that he never really got over that loss of a very fine model and he pretty much gave up on building models after that. If that had been a Lego loco that had hit the floor it could have been put together again in short order and no harm done, Life is too short, build things with Lego and have fun

That was exactly the reason why I gave up on model trains in other scales, - with Lego you can build everything yourself and it's really fun. Welcome to the world of Lego trains. Nice review btw and cool photos to go with it.

Corker!

Well I've got my steam electric loco I can contribute to the gathering

Wow! Both those MOCs are sooooo good. So many brilliant details with the pavillion and while the colours are definitely 'Friends' it's certainly not a total riot of pink and purple. I love the castle tower too, I would have liked to see more pictures of it, but from the two that were on the webpage it's plainly a magnificent MOC. Lucky little girl to have such a nice Dad. What delights me about 'Friends' is that it's all about human interactions. The girls do things together, they're busy and active and they have adventures together. Having just written that I guess it would be a really good idea to have a 'Friends' hospital or medical centre set to take care of all the bumps and bruises they're bound to get from having such an active lifestyle. As an ex social worker who worked in medical environments I can see sets built around the actual nuts and bolts of patient care with doctors and nurses and bottles of medicine, stethoscopes & etc. A wheelchair would be good to have in such a set as well. Shopping? - well perhaps just a little, but certainly sets built around social meet ups such as a cafe with outside tables. A good gym set would be good to see and I was a little disappointed that Stephanie's soccer set had just the one goal (with no net) and there wasn't another friend in soccer kit to play with her. If I have a favourite it's Olivia and her workshop set was the very first 'Friends' set I purchased for myself. I would like to see more hands on doing technical things type of sets, but I am aware that in New Zealand at least Olivia's workshop set was the one that stayed on the store shelves the longest. My WIP train layout is meant to represent a preserved railway and of course Olivia is a member of the preservation society and does her bit.

'Shellubrication' used to be commonly seen on Shell petrol stations. Shell is now under new corporate ownership here in New Zealand so if any older petrol stations still have this signage they won't for very much longer.