zephyr1934

Looking good, I think I have a photo somewhere with a bunch of these in a dead line. Only one small suggestion for future MOCs. Right now you describe the build details, then show several shots of the prototype before showing your MOC. Why not lead off with a good shot of the MOC before the prototype shots and/or move discussion of the build details until after the prototypes? Just a thought, I still was able to follow everything.

Thanks all for the kind words... @KlodsBrick Oh, these are the train to go with the Conrail GP40 locomotives. I've pulled them around R40 curves, R88 curves and R104 curves for several hours with the GP40's. @pirzyk The bottom of the containers ride about 1.5 bricks above the rail and each container is 6 bricks tall (layer of plates, 1x6x5 panels, layer of plates, layer of tiles), so the net is 13.5 bricks above the rail. @v6TransAM Yeah, tell me about it, my son is getting in to HO and I am amazed that a lot of what I build is cheaper in lego than the comparable car or locomotive is in HO. @legoman666 You're going to have to move fast, before I just give them away... well... I guess I ain't fast but I do intend to give the basic design away. @dr_spock If you look closely at the ribbed side cars I used technic beams for the longitudinal strength. Those are then pinned in right below the technic plates that connect to the trucks, so those should have no problems. The smooth sided version uses bricks rather than technic (some of the technic beams were among the rare parts, as well as the tiles with studs on the edges). Each side at each end is held on by at least 3 studs, or 6 studs total on either end. My first thought was "gee, how weak?" but then I thought some more, a 2x8 technic beam with holes used to clip a truck in has at most 6 studs holding it in place. You just have to be careful when putting the containers in. If you are too aggressive you can pop the studs off on one side, but you just squeeze them back on once the container is in the well. So far no problems in operation. Functionally the two designs are effectively identical at the ends with the exception that all of the snot transitions are by studs in the smooth side (1x1 brick with stud) and most are with technic pins in the ribbed side (1x1 brick with hole). @Rodundus Those rounded ends are the very thing that required the greatest focus of the redesign iterations to make sure they were both as long as possible and still able to negotiate R40 curves. That and making sure there was sufficient room for the shared truck to turn, hence the hole visible on the inside of the ribbed sided design, and filled with a 1x2x2 panel in the smooth sided design. I was quite tickled when I was able to make the smooth transition from a 1x4 double curve slope to a 1x1 cheese brick, and even more tickled when I could continue that transition in to a 1x2 curved slope in the smooth sided version. @lostdriveway I had been thinking of other roads, but of course that would mean completely new artwork for the stickers. I do have a specific one in mind, but I first want to explore part availability before I go into any specific design.

I had these great looking containers built up to show off the container line decals, but no trains to run them on. I guess I need some well cars... I wanted the containers to be large enough to look plausible while having the cars small enough that they could negotiate lego R40 curves. I figured the optimal container size of a 40 ft container at my scale would be about 5 wide, 25 long and 4.33 tall. I've come to like the smooth sides of the 1x6x5 panels so I went with 6x24x5.67 for 40 ft containers and 12 long for 20 ft containers. Of course that meant that I had to rebuild all of my 18 long containers. I figured out how I wanted the cars to look. After going through several iterations I finally got all of the wheels to work on curves, and then took a few more iterations to make them look pretty. The end result wound up looking like this: I really liked how the car number wound up looking when it crosses a rib. That is using a 1x1 tile and carefully aligning two stickers to make it all look like one continuous black stripe. Here's the shared truck A top view going around an R40 curve And the well cars when empty I ultimately want to be able to share this design to go with the Conral GP40's and round out my gateway design for AFOLs taking the first steps away from sets. I tried to make the cars out of common pieces but my first design (above, with ribbed sides) in yellow had four or five uncommon pieces. I wound up buying out all of the large lots, so much for a sharable design. So I took another approach with smooth sides, This time all of the critical parts are currently in production, though a few are not quite common yet (2x2 curved slopes). There are also a couple of pieces on the inside that are no longer common in yellow (1x2x2 panels) so I'll probably change a portion of the interior to black. More on this design when I get the time to put it in a form I can share (ideally instructions, but failing that at least LDD). With the larger containers I also needed larger decals for Evergreen, Hamburg Sud, Maersk and MSC (the ones shown for these four lines are larger than what I am currently offering for sale but feel free to drop me a PM if you find them of interest). I ultimately built three 3 well cars and one 5 well car The full gallery can be found here. Questions, comments, suggestions, and general feedback are all welcome

Ah, okay, that makes total sense. Dark red would be best if you were not planning on using any stickers, but definitely better with black under stickers to get the right shape. It is one of the characteristic features of this engine.

Oh wow, that is an excellent rendition, spot on! Even got all of the sanding tubes coming down, few steam models go in to that much detail but that really makes the resolution seem to be higher than what is possible in lego. Neat little tricks on the headlights too. While it might fail on a purity test, the glued drivers are still a clever solution. And the paint, well, even lego does that in the legoland parks. I do like the white tires on the driver wheels, helps make the engine pop. I had heard that the engineer's seat is on the left side rather than the American convention of having the engineer on the right side. In any event, it is a great build.

With as much of the truck frame is concealing, since this is a static model could you just move the lego train wheels down a few plates so that the axle centers are actually below where they look like they are on the outside of the frame?

The dark red stripe below the runningboards turned black in the revision, was that by design?

Excellent capture of the essence of the Hudsons in such a small model! You might be best just building that up by hand. Often digital designs that look like they should work will get hung up in curves, switches, etc. and physical stuff that looks like it shouldn't work turns out to.

A very fine workhorse of a prototype with an equally fine rendering in brick. Great work! You got all of the angles and built up a nice looking train to go with it (with more kudos for those cars). That's the nice thing about building a surviving steamer, someone has probably already taken 100's of pictures of it. I've become dependent on the web for reference shots. I did a google image search on "151F-3101" and that turned up this shot of the cab interior, and wow, that looks like a fantastic museum (even have an ALCO built close cousin of the PA or FA)

That is looking really sharp! Truly top notch. You lamented your trucks but I have to say using the grated cheese slopes for leaf springs like that is a great looking technique that I don't think I've seen before. The only tweak to them I would contemplate is to see how they look nudged out by half a stud or moved up 1 plate to add a gap below the outside portion of the slope. You had mentioned that you might rebuild down the road, there is a bonus about the stickers, you should be able to remove and reapply them. I haven't tried it yet with a sticker this large, but I did just rebuild several containers and reapplied stickers that were first applied over a year ago. If you ever think of going there drop me a PM and I can give you more tips.

That is a fantastic build and all sorts of great detailing inside and out.

Here's an old thread showing the silver and dark brown (all plastic) ME rails. Heh heh, excellent wrt the 261. While I was hardly an important contributor I helped with some of the grunt work during the original restoration after she came out of Green Bay.

Well... there was that little Kiddicraft purchase in 1981, but generally they do not buy many companies. Typically Lego will just appropriate good ideas from 3rd party companies and make their own version though (cows, pigs, steam driver wheels, etc.)

That looks very similar to my design that was in the REC reveal in RailBricks #12 (currently unavailable due to RB site being down). I say that just for familiarity sake, like you I borrowed most of the good ideas from several other folks. I have several images of the switches in this folder. I used a 9v train power supply and a series of pole reversers to operate the switches. As you say, just a short pulse to throw the switch, the motor is strong enough to throw an unmodified switch and only stalls for a fraction of a second as long as you quickly turn the power off.

Oh yes, that is where the track would shine, but if I were building a detailed display I would probably do away with the 2x8's altogether, use a 8 wide plate as ballast and 1x tiles for ties (another great feature of the ME tracks). I don't do much scenery though, I don't even have time to build all of the trains I'd like to (grin). So I just use plain track on the ground.

Looking excellent! Lots of great detail, I am particularly fond of the brickwork. The garage doors are a simple but very effective touch, especially the one being "opened" by a minifig. So in your photos of the prototype is that shot of the parking lot where the tracks originally? Was this station decommissioned once the Union Terminal opened?

Excellent little build and the colors of the prototype really make it pop!

All I have to say is that the curves are fantastic, I have two loops of R104 and two loops of R88 and they are great. The hardest part is resisting the urge to build trains that will not run on the normal R44 lego curves (so far only one has slipped though). I'm working on a project for NMRA coming up (more on that in a different post when it's complete) so I laid out a set of temporary loops in the basement and WOW just about any train looks so much better on the ME curves. You can also go faster and pull more through the curves. I do have two quibbles about the curves though (bringing my rating down to 9.5/10). First, both the R88 and R104 have a single center receiver bar meant to fit between the 2 studs on a 2x8 in place so that this tie (sleeper) is exactly half way between either end of a track segment. Unfortunately, the R108 track has four sleepers so there is no center tie and you usually do not use the alignment bar. Related to this point, it would have been nice if there were four such bars for the R108 and three for the R88 so that you had a guide to align all of the ties. It is difficult to get the ties in just the right spots. Second, once built the assembly is fragile... probably strong enough for a home layout, but when I take it apart to put away a temporary layout the rails will often pull off of the track connector piece or a few of the ties fall out. Presumably a similar problem is what led lego to switch from the blue and white 12v track to the gray tracks with the clips. Since I will need to set up and tear down fairly quickly at the NMRA show, I took the plunge tonight and glued (well... plastiwelded) all of my curve segments. It is nice to be able to wave them in the air without falling apart. So far so good and definitely worth the hassle. I also have a section of the silver and dark brown track. If I were starting from scratch I'd seriously consider that color combination, it looks really sharp. But I have way too much gray lego track to want to mix in another color scheme and there are no matching switches. Still, the possibilities of two tone track is certainly a bonus option. Anyway, the ME models rails are fantastic! They might be a little more work but they are so worth it. Thank you ME for making these a reality!

Digging through my archives, from about 9 years ago I do have a 47 car train that ran for a few hours and a 51 car train that ran for a few loops. Both used 9v motors and standard lego curves.

Looks fantastic, hope it gets translated to English at some point, for now I guess I'll just have to stumble through the German. It is up and available on Amazon in the US too, my copy should arrive within 10 days!

Another excellent build ShrikeArghast! Although I'm going to have to insist you stop all of this prolific-ness, you're making the rest of us look bad (grin), no no no, just kidding, keep it up it is neat to see this steady stream of designs.

I think the issues with NMRA is not whether they like lego trains or not, I think the issue is that our chosen manufacturer is not interested in participating. While most of the activity in NMRA is model railroaders modeling railroads, at the heart the organization is a multi-manufacture counterpart to the lego ambassadors. I suspect if TLG showed interest (money?) in being part of NMRA that L-guage would be recognized. None of the third party suppliers are large enough to truly represent the scale. I THINK at the 2005 national train show (or maybe 2006?) we came close to NMRA recognition, lego was planning to have a presence from the vendor side (that was back when the Super Chief, BNSF and TTX cars were still in production). Jake McKee was in charge of community relations and had started the Lego Train Club (LTC) program as the first real venue between TLG and AFOL. But then lego pulled out, Jake no longer worked for lego, and the lego train world has been a little sadder ever since. I was a newbe in the AFOL world then so I didn't really know much of what was going on from the corporate side. There are a few of the ILTCO (the fan side of the LTC equation) officers still lurking these parts and they might have more insight. The whole LTC thing launched because lego finally recognized that while AFOLs were small in number of customers, seeing all of that brick on a train display meant that a single AFOL could consume 10x what the typical kid would. The focus of community relations was initially strictly train (hence many AFOL groups were LTC rather than LUG), but then the original round of lego ambassadors (who had significant input on set design), the success of modular houses and other sets that would now be called Creator Expert, explosion of lego conventions, etc. shifted TLG's AFOL focus away from being strictly trains. This broader view makes sense from a corporate perspective. The initial train focus by TLG also makes sense. The AFOL community as we know it was an outgrowth of the internet: bricklink allowed people to swap parts, lugnet allowed people to share stories (preceded by rec.toys.lego and alt.toys.lego for the really old farts) and brickshelf allowed people to share photos. From this lego train displays were the smallest "big thing" that could stand on its own in a public display. Half a dozen AFOLs could put together a nice lego train display that would grab a lot of public attention. As for the model railroaders modeling railroads, as Tony said, we do not need NMRA to connect us to lego. In my experience NMRA is very open to us contributing their displays at all levels from local to national. In the same conversation I had with the NMRA president, he also said that they would love it if we AFOLs had our own set of sessions at the NMRA national meeting. So NMRA is open to us. As for the occasional conventional model railroader shaking their head at lego trains, that also makes sense. If I spent 20 years building a to-die-for modular layout and I saw the kids running to the plastic bricks I wouldn't be thrilled. In the 1950's trains were sort of the lego of today, almost all boys played with trains. For most of today's kids (at least in the US) lego is far more tangible than trains. Finally, this lengthy discussion about NMRA is actually on topic in this RailBricks thread because the RailBricks grew out of the LTC groups that put on the displays at 2005-2007 NMRA national train shows.

At the NMRA 2014 national train show the president of NMRA came over and complemented me on my very nice trains, thanked me (and by extension the other lego builders on display) for bringing our "toys" (his words... which is true... but no less toys than any of the other layouts at the show). I asked about making L-guage formal, to which he said NMRA is a liaison organization between he manufacturers and the modelers. Since there is only a single manufacturer it just does not make sense. In that regard he was probably right, there is little they could do for us that we do not already have (could you imagine the likes of TLG sitting down with Athearn, Walthers, etc.?). Especially since our manufacturer of choice probably is not interested in coming to that table. RailBricks was great fun, but also took a lot of work to produce. The thing that I think really did us in was in the span of 3 years the contributors collectively had something like two dozen kids. Nothing gets in the way of playing with your toys like having to share your toys with some munchkin who has no appreciation for SNOT. One of the things we really need is the focal point that was RailBricks.org I would really love a goto site that housed train only instructions, LDD files, and LDraw files. Toss in the various reference archives from ILTCO and new content. Probably curate it to keep the quality top notch (and spammers out) Hey stranger! Good to have you roaming around these parts (and Mr. Ward as well). And with an excellent idea to boot.

The locomotive and consist are looking great. As others have said, you are really capturing these locomotives. I also like how you did the cars, though the copula on the caboose seems one or two plates too tall. If you are seriously considering building them in real brick you should start taking a part inventory of which bricks actually exist (when I digitally build I always have a bricklink window open to make sure the part exists and is not stupid expensive). Right now I can see several parts that never existed in the colors you used. There are almost always work arounds, e.g., perhaps brick built windows on the cars, but it adds to the challenge (both in a good and sometimes frustrating ways). Strangely there is a very well preserved and operational K-27 that has gone somewhat astray in Michigan (google Huckleberry Railroad), it looks great, but they really need to install some 5000 ft mountains along the line.

Good job capturing the essence of a logging locomotive, of course now you need some poorly laid panel track and a bunch of stumps for it to navigate over/through.