legoman666

You snapped several very nice photos. Even my splattered Amtrak looks neat. I might be persuaded to go to KSC, although it's a bit of a drive. Rather save my gas money for brickworld and brickfair. honestly, that was sad that we had to give up so early. Best part of Brickworld is sticking around after public hours and drinking, the old timers at NMRA call it quits at like 630p and go to bed.

The 2017 show is in god forsaken Orlando, so all (well, the OKILUG people anyway) us mid-westerners are going to sit it out I think.

Tell Zephyr to put up a photo of what my Amtrak looked like at the end of the show ;)

Hah, probably never! I will probably rebuild my Amtrak to use the same system. I was also told to make a Western Maryland SD40 using the same drive train too. Everything besides the blue tooth controller is off the shelf components, anyone with soldering experience could put one together.

Contacts inside the motor could be broken.

Finally got around to decaling this loco. Glad everyone liked it!

Finished up the decals, the right hand side railing, and fixed some electronic issues I was having. All done I guess. It has been going in circles next to me for about an hour with no issues. Choo choo.

Glad you like it! I'll throw up a couple photos after the long weekend. Hah! You'll be able to see it for yourself in a week and give me crap for the 1/2 plate offset. The very same. Electronics are untouched since then except for some tidying up of the wires before I bricked it over. In a 5 wide body, it's so much easier not having to hide the battery box. The capacitors I used are about 0.2mm less than 3 studs, so they fit perfectly inside the 5 wide body stacked together. I had the seller send a photo of a caliper measurement before I purchased them so I could be sure that they would fit.

Greetings TrainTech, I'd like to show a few photos of my latest locomotive. This is my third SD40-2 in a row, the first two being a Canadian National and a Vale. Both of these were a challenge to build even though they're both unpowered dummy units, but I'd thought I'd step it up a notch on my third and motorize it. With that in mind, I started with the electronics. The Bluetooth motor controller is a homemade build of Codefox's open source BT Bricks. Picking up track power I use modified O Gauge steel wheels from OSO Rail. To store power I'm doing something a little different than normal; rather than batteries, I'm using Super Capacitors. There are tradeoffs when using Super Caps that I'm not really going to get in to on this post, but I think they are worth it. Not too complicated, but it sure is a pain hiding all the wires... Anyway, to the photos: Getting power from the trucks to the electronics is always tricky, but this home made slip ring wannabe is pretty reliable. The metal technic axle is stainless steel, some guy on bricklink sells them. The decals are custom printed at home on clear waterslide decal sheets that I got from Amazon. They turned out better than I expected, although they are slightly transparent. Centering the 4 wide hood on the 7 wide cab is a challenge, especially keeping the windshield in the middle. If I remember right, using technic wheels with the tires was recommended to me by Cale when I was at Brickworld Chicago a couple weeks ago. Looks good. Getting the side vents just right was kind of a pain and even now I think they're a little too prominent. That said, the curved side vent turned out well. The red stripe going down the side is not 1 brick high, but rather 1 stud high. 5 plates = 2 studs, so that leaves a 1/2 plate height gap that I needed to compensate for in the black top. On the very back (where the rear 3 vents are), I couldn't find a way to add in that 1/2 plate since the motor is behind the wall meaning that the height above the walkways is actually 17.5 plates tall whereas the rest of the locomotive is 17 plates tall. Now that I know how to build them, I prefer brick built couplers rather than using Lego's (they're 6 wide anyway, mine are 8). I'm also happy with my truck details, they're quite strong. The center axle floats both up and down and side to side. I cut the axle long so that it floats inside the back of the headlight bricks.

Ive tried using power pickups on wheelsets that were not powered by a motor. If they pick up from the top of the track they have 1 major problem, they never slip, which means they get dirty. I'm talking in like 30-40 minutes so dirty that they don't function.

I'm throwing money at my screen but nothing is happening.

Pretty neat. I've done similar stuff with Arduino, seems like C# is much easier than VDL. I'll bet that little FPGA board cost more than a nice arduino mini, too.

Awesome! What liquid are you using?

You Europeans have much more choice when building passenger trains than we do in the US. Nicely done, those curved transitions between colors must have been difficult.

I'm going to steal your designs :) very well done.

Not really. There are a couple here from the construction, but they are pretty low quality. http://www.longworthhall.com/about.html Lol, here is the interior: It was mainly a freight terminal so the only photos I can find show loading docks. The street view shot I posted is from where the tracks were. The other 2 are from the parking lot on the other side. Here is an old photo: http://www.jjakucyk.com/transit/bo/large-7.html Not sure when it was decommissioned, information about it is kind of sparse considering its on the national historic building registry... Glad you all like it

Perhaps a brick too short, but if you look at the photos of the real thing, they are not very big. Thanks! Most of the building was easy but I unable to render the double arch above the windows. Glad you like it! I used parts from 3 Ghostbuster Firehouses plus about $100 from Brick link. Everything else I already had. So about $1000 total, but i still have a ton of the pieces from the Firehouses left over. As for the top row of windows, I also only have 2 rows of windows underneath the arches. Because I didn't make mine as long as the real thing, making it as tall would have looked too out of scale. Also, I ran out of windows :) It's gigantic in real life. Pretty cool architecture inside too

Been working on this for several weeks. Almost done. The real thing is about 1250' long and is one of the longest buildings in the country (at least when it was completed in 1904). In its present form, it's actually shorter in length than it used to be, parts of it were torn down to build the Brent Spence Bridge. The property used to feature a round house, shed, etc. Today it is used mainly for offices. Of course, I couldn't build it to scale. At the same scale as my locomotives, the building would have been 875 studs (27 baseplates) long. I opted to make mine 4 baseplates in length. I may expand it in the future by tearing down an end wall or perhaps by adding an extra section in the middle. It does come apart in the middle, look closely and you'll see the seam. In the RL: Couple small things left to do. Need to light up the two loading docks that I left the garage doors open on and I'm missing a few pieces in the upper corners. I think those will have to come from a Bricklink order. I'm working a new SD40-2 in Chessie heraldry that'll be right at home sitting in front of the depot.

If you put an h at the end of the image urls so that they end in h.jpg, they will be 1024x768 instead of their max size.

http://www.okilug.com/ Turfway Race Park in Florence, KY (just south of Cincinnati, OH) Come see us this weekend!

Nicely rendered. I made some similar ones a while ago:

Fantastic job. Not every good looking model needs to be put on Lego Ideas, it's already cluttered with thousands of impossible projects. This would never get made, too finicky and too many old out of production pieces.

The Bluetooth motor controllers that codefox designed never disconnect unless the batteries get too low. I leave mine at home connected to my Nexus 7 tablet, it's been continuously connected for like 2 months now without disconnecting.

You win. How do you get enough traction?

Love the top griles. Well done