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zephyr1934

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Everything posted by zephyr1934

  1. zephyr1934
    Nope nope nope, I'm sure those little minifigures snuck in to my bedroom at night and rifled through my head to find the idea that one night I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat to bed! (grin) In any event, excellent work Pizzareno and good to see we have some sort of new train set.
  2. zephyr1934
    Well the WV train is interesting... wish they had gone for a 4-4-0 instead of a 4-2-0. Looks like a reworked Toy Story train. Hopefully this has a black bogie plate under the engine instead of the current yellow ones... hum... might be red. And those !@#$% bums at Lego, they stole my idea for having a wheel powered contraption on a car... worse yet... of it being a running train. Naw, I was thinking about it but actually I am glad to see that feature.
  3. zephyr1934
    Nice, I'm surprised that more people haven't done this.
  4. zephyr1934
    Excellent work with a lot of details both visible and hidden. The headlight looks very sharp the way it shines through the trans clear plates
  5. zephyr1934
    Looks like a great start. The 2 wide snotted door window is a great idea, really helps with fitting more detail in a tight space, I came up with that one too and use it a lot. To hide the seam from the tiles you can instead use a 1x2x1 trans clear panel for the window. You might want to look around at what other folks have done with this train. Two things I see is that many folks have used curved fences for the observation platform and I think the train cars in the movie had clearstory roofs. I like what you did to get the curved and sloping roof over the rear platform.
  6. zephyr1934
    Aw, look at that beautiful little locomotive. Amazing work with so much detail and electronics packed in such a small package.
  7. zephyr1934
    Heavier actually gives you more traction, if you do wind up going that route just make sure to use rechargeable batteries and that the box is installed so that you can easily swap them out (assuming you are not using the LiPo box) since you'll need a new charge every 2-3 hrs. As for the XL motors, keep in mind that they are slow unless you build in a gearbox.
  8. zephyr1934
    Wo... wo... wow!!! Those photos do NOT look like lego, this looks like a fine HO or G gauge model that was used for inspiration. Have you shown your work to conventional modelers and gotten any feedback? You truly make a compelling argument for 11-12 wide builds. This model is just SOOO perfect. You even modeled the underframe, insane! I have to look VERY hard to find any compromise from the prototype (aside from the necessary cab full of electronics). Are those trans clear jumper plates on the cab window? This MOC is definitely one of the best lego steam engines I have ever seen! You are quite welcome for the small part that the rods made to help you pull off this masterpiece.
  9. zephyr1934
    With PF you can (more comfortably) pull heavier trains than with 9v. The train motor is a little more powerful and does not suffer power loss due to the resistance of the rail joints. The B-unit in this set has a pair of PF train motors, battery and receiver (was IR but changed to SBrick to deliver more power to pull long cars through lego curves). With the daylight you probably want a fast locomotive, but if you don't care about speed, you could use a pair of XL motors and basically pull anything you want, e.g., as was used in this tender (click here for the guts).
  10. zephyr1934
    I thought I heard a 13 long technic beam screaming in pain! (grin... actually, that's a brilliant way of getting a technic half beam longer than 7). The build is fantastic with all sorts of great details. The blue, yellow and red kick in first and it looks like Thomas... the cartoon Thomas... but in color only. Look closer and indeed, it is a very accurate MOC of a real locomotive. Do you have a CAD rendering of the design in other liveries too? The smokebox door handles are brilliant. I think I see a technic half bushing at the top of the stack but am not sure what the thin disk is below. The pinstriping around the locomotive is insane, or at least you must have gone insane while attempting it, very impressive. And I know it is plain and simple, but I like how the plank wagon turned out (and the load is just icing on the cake). Great work all around.
  11. zephyr1934
    Well I was going to say, "until you pointed out that I really needed some R72 curves." ( thpt! ) But yes, definitely a good tip for all who might attempt to venture where we have been. I already find it sort of strange that my lego toolbox includes a pliers and a computer, why not toss in a knife too!
  12. zephyr1934
    Nope nope nope, not possible. I refuse to believe that you were able to make it look that good in only 8 wide, can't be, not true. Seriously though, you did an excellent job with this build, looks great and all of the detail is impressive. Lots of great details, not least of which is how you assembled the nose.
  13. zephyr1934
    Yep, but if you are at a show 4 hrs away from your Xacto when you discover the conflict it can be a bummer
  14. zephyr1934
    Yet another excellent layout, you guys just put on a better and better show year after year. Can't get enough of those big curves (and the big cut) the Red Lion, and of course the PennLUG play... I mean roundhouse. Do NOT show the tank loading area to my son. The ladder track and night shots are also incredible. You guys give it about 200% to create a real model railroad layout. Of course the best thing about the layout are the trains though (grin).
  15. zephyr1934
    I got it in a hobby store, it is quite common in those venues, I believe it is MEK as per a post between my last and here, probably cheaper per oz. in a hardware store. With even the slightest bump the plow buffer will squeak on 9v rail, that was a design fault in my opinion
  16. zephyr1934
    There is at least one operating tank engine in the SF bay area in Niles Canyon (2-6-2 logging locomotive). They were also somewhat common as industrial switchers and many large roundhouses in the US would typically have one little tank engine to move the large steam engines on/off the turntable when they were not under steam (e.g., Soo Line, Southern Pacific)
  17. zephyr1934
    Yep, tower, signals, switches and an interlocking to prevent conflicting movements, all built out of lego. From the outside it looks like a tower with the levers on the top floor, but the shell of the building comes off to show the inside with the mechanism on what would be the "ground floor" of the tower. Some of the show photos show the tower shell on and off. Well, I spoke in the singular, as noted in earlier posts Gerrit built two, one for each end of the layout. One had illuminated signal heads in the semaphores, the other did not. He is still working on a satisfactory solution for the switches. Purely mechanical connections need the switches modified to have no latching, but then the wires have enough slop that a train could easily pick the point on a facing point movement. So Gerrit is still working on it.
  18. zephyr1934
    Yes, without glue the track will come apart when handling. Gluing it makes it more "lego-like" in terms of function, providing a single track section. I have also found that when running heavy trains the outside rail will slowly give way and release itself from the ties below, especially at the joints between sections (a single stud holds the rails down at that point, so usually the stud comes off before the joiner pieces separate). So I used ABS plasti-weld (same stuff lego uses for the large scale models... but then again, lego is not against painting the bricks in the parks too), it is nice because it won't glue you and once set it is a tighter bond than the ABS itself. But agreed, not something for purists even when wandering away from pure lego parts to the stuff lego SHOULD produce for AFOLs.
  19. zephyr1934
    That's a great little tank engine and excellent choice of colors.
  20. zephyr1934
    Ah, probably. I was just looking at the standard bricks and did not even think of that one. There is a 1x16 brick on the other side of the tender and the only shade of blue for either of these bricks is normal blue.
  21. zephyr1934
    Almost certainly regular blue, but looking at the brickliink catalog it does not look like there has ever been a 1x14 brick, just 1x16. But Carl is not against modifying bricks so my guess is that it is a cut down 1x16 brick.
  22. zephyr1934
    That seems too tight. I definitely applaud your idea of making it reasonable price and presumably using semi-common parts, but the cost of lego in general and train parts in particular has gone way up since 2002. I think the loco was MSRP of $35 and cars were $30. Using the Horizon Express as a measure I'd suggest a target of at least $50 for the locomotive (unpowered) and $40 for each car. That was one thing that REALLY surprised me about the sets, so few people redecorated them or built MODs (of course many who did are reading this forum, this audience is atypical in that regard, grin)
  23. zephyr1934
    Personally I think Cale's crosshead design is tough to beat in terms of reliability and low drag. I used it in this MOD... with more details here. Note how there is no piston to go in to the cylinder and bind. The half pin sliding between bars is surprisingly stable, this version just sticks the 4 long bars into the holes of a bracket and stabilizes them with a 2 long technic half beam.
  24. zephyr1934
    Well, we shimmed all of the tables and that helped a ton (pirzyk doing most of the heavy lifting) and at that point most of the tables were good (except for the finger piercing staples hanging off of most of them). A couple of them had sags and one was complete trash. That was one of the saggers and the sag in the 8 ft table is highlighted in that shot because of the oblique angle. Some of my club's tables sag a similar amount but they do so in just 5 ft. We have plastic banquet tables and members who like to stand on them to assemble 6 ft tall skyscrapers. That makes running steam engines a real challenge, it took a few generations but I've figured out how to keep them on unlevel track.
  25. zephyr1934
    Very nice indeed!
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