legoman666

Sweet. I vote that you extend it to the fourth coach :)

Part of my layout has 5 parallel curved tracks, Lego R40, ME R56, 72, 88 & 104.

Basically done. Needs some decals is all. If you want to retain your sanity, I don't recommend doing the real grills this way. I'm happy with how the truck details turned out.

But then I'd be wasting 5W. I'll probably step down the voltage across a bunch of diodes.

The first loco I built is Bluetooth, this one is 9v. My Lug has some long shows that run unattended, and this locomotive will be for them. Just waiting on a BrickLink order for the rest of the pieces.

A couple of folks from my Lug were invited by the Museum Center in Cincinnati (the one that looks like the hall of justice) to do a small display in the space after Nathan Sawaya's Art of the Brick exhibit. So we built it and got it all set up, only to have Nathan tell the museum to take it down because it competed with his exhibit. He literally had them put a tarp over it during the exhibits premiere. The museum felt terrible about it and so invited us to be part of their annual Christmas train show instead. So anyway, Sawaya is a douche, and our display was moved to the Holiday Junction display, where it'll probably have a better home anyway. Come see it.

I connect the AAA battery boxes with NiMh batteries in them in parallel all the time. My horizon express has 3 battery packs in parallel. Seems to work fine.

Almost the entire body is snot. The top will be regular studs up though.

Working on this now. I'll run a piece of red vinyl sticker down through the middle of the white stripe. This unit will use 2 9v train motors so that I'll actually have a locomotive that can run unattended at long Lug shows. Funnily enough, this is my first train moc I've ever made that uses 9v motors.

I had the stripes custom cut for me to the exact height of a Lego plate. If you have a steady hand, you could probably do it yourself using vinyl bought from an auto parts store. Thanks everyone! I still need to make a couple more coaches to complete the set.

Looks good, I made a similar truss bridge that spanned 6' with a single support in the middle. My track wasn't table level like yours though, it was 1 brick off the table. It only sagged a little, yours pushing against the table edge might alleviate that to some extent. I think most of the flex comes from the Lego bending though.

I finally got mine mostly done. Made an extra platform section but ran out of pieces for the roof.

Looks good for a first effort. A few things: those U joints will fail, and quickly. Your middle axle on your bogies will need to be able to slide side to side in order to navigate standard Lego curves. There is a 3 axle truck in rail bricks issue 6 that resolves this issue. My last comment is more a matter of taste, but your cab windows are a bit too tall. Consider using 1 x 2 x 2 clear wall panels on their side. Your wheel trim looks great, but if you have a middle sliding axle, the wheels will collide with the trim. Spacing the trim away from the wheels will fix this, but then it'll look a little too wide. If you don't want to deal with the complexities of a sliding axle, just get rid of the middle axle altogether and fake it with the trim.

You can probably find all of the missing pieces on bricklink for very cheap. Just navigate to the catalog page for your set, and view the inventory. Then add the missing pieces to a wish list and find a store with all of the items.

Got my decals custom printed and some red vinyl striping. Not sure if I should keep the stripe on the bottom of the passenger coaches. There is one in real life, but its much smaller than my sticker. I used the red vinyl stripe to continue the red plate stripe on the front. First time doing a brick built coupler. Turned out ok. Should I keep the red stripe on the bottom?

Like the color scheme. Looks like you drew a lot of inspiration from Swoofty.

Holy cow that's huge. Well done. Love the details on the side of the boiler.

I tested one of my own locomotives in the same way; I had it pull a weight up. I kept adding weight until it couldn't pull any more. The locomotive I tested has steel wheels, so the traction is kind of low for its weight. On metal track, it could pull 340g. On plastic track, 390g. The locomotive itself weighed 1152g. If this locomotive had rubber bands on the wheels, I'm pretty sure it would tear itself apart because the wheels would never slip.

I put a linear regulator in and it over heated in about 5 minutes. Bah.

I made several of these for use in the locomotive: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=87340 The boombox came with the battery and its own circuit board, so I'm not sure what bt chip it actually has. Probably something cheap.

Looks great. Any plans to put the logos on the side?

Codefox's bt controller has a throttle slider as well, and it has the same difficulty in selecting the zero point in the middle. Sometimes I switch interfaces to the replica PF controller and press stop because it's easier. It also has 27 speed steps in each direction, nice smooth acceleration :) Sbrick sounds nice. The north american dealer was at Brickfair this year, I talked to him for about half an hour. I assume you ordered yours from him and not from the UK? His price was good too, especially taking in to account the exchange rate.

I ordered a 5v linear regulator. Thanks for the suggestion! For some reason I thought they would be big, but after looking into it a little, I can see that they are not. Almost finished another 2 cars. Missing some detail work. I'm out of those blue windows for now. Got some more on the way from Europe.

http://shawmutcarshops.com/?page_id=137 Fun guy to talk to. Forget how I stumbled across the ad.

El cheapo eBay special: http://www.ebay.com/itm/151693472299 there are a bunch of sellers. Works surprisingly well. Maybe. It's probably too tall to make it fit using the 75 degree slopes. Better video: Camera switch is inside a little removable door. Uses a lot of power so I don't like it being on all the time. Still have to figure out how to wire it up to my main power source on the locomotive. BT controller is getting 10.8V, camera needs 5. Might step it down across several diodes, but that takes up a lot of space. Bridge rectifier, bluetooth motor controller, DC-DC converter. Diode is from the battery backup. Appropriately enough, it all fits inside the fuel tank. Phosphor bronze wire scraping the back of the wheels to pick up track power, which is then transferred to the stainless steel axle via a thingy I came up with. There's probably a classification for this way of transferring power to something spinning, but I don't know it. This is how I'm getting power from the axle to the DC-DC converter. The reason I do it this way instead of with a wire is because the wire tends to break from bending every time the locomotive takes a turn. This also allows me to take the truck off the train without desoldering the wire.