zephyr1934

Oh wow! That's a great build. The detailing is over the top. With all of those plates I bet it is heavier that all get out. I have seen the plates a bricks a few times before, but that never detracts from the beauty of that technique.

That is a nice update that uses the metroliner's colors very well. Bonus points for good part usage.

That is a great mid-sized station with an awful lot of attention to detail (snotted cheese bricks that look like real bricks, the diagonal railings out front, many little architectural features, etc.). The ballast looks great and the alignment of the tracks make sense for a through station like this. It would be ideal if the platforms could be longer, but that is a problem that afflicts almost all lego stations. You never think just how long a real train platform is until you attempt to build one out of lego.

While indeed there are all sorts of interesting bits in old threads like this, please do not bump an old topic just to add a small comment or ask a quick question. Few of the readers will remember the original discussion and it just becomes confusing for the regular readers. If you have questions for the original poster you can try sending them a private message. You can also start a new thread if you have a related topic that is not a direct continuation. Of course if you do have a substantial follow up to an old thread it is sometimes appropriate to do a bump like this, e.g., "I finally built this and found...."

That's a nice display... and huge. The staging yards at the end of the video are interesting, did you have a complete loop around the layout with the trains running continuously, or were you running trains from one yard to the other?

I'm sure any similarity to any train living or dead was purely coincidental. (grin) In other words, not close enough to require a license.

It is neat to see your building process and the MOC looks great so far. You captured a lot of the details and made good work with those 1x2x2 windows to counter the normally low resolution of lego bricks.

I already have the black porthole and windshield stickers available (I have discontinued the older versions and will supply ones like in this photo). I am probably at the point where I could offer the transparent porthole stickers in several colors and I am working to the point where I could offer some set of "semi-customizable" stickers for sale, e.g., the reporting marks and logos from my last two posts. For small orders perhaps pick from a set of 6 or 8 different numbers for the reporting marks, printed in either black or white. For larger orders, specify the numbers you want. It would probably be about 1 USD per square inch and at least at the start there will likely be a delay between ordering and when I am able to ship. If you are interested feel free to drop me a private message. I have a few more ideas that I am working on before officially rolling out the red carpet though. For custom stickers like the North Coast Limited... well... the time to lay those out was insane and the likelihood of being able sell a second copy of work like that is probably close to zilch. So I probably could not offer that level of service at a price that most folks would be interested in paying for. Though in this vein, I have finished a few more MOCs and will posting those as soon as I can.

I like that MOC, and impressive that you fit all the PF inside while still getting the facade so detailed on such a small engine

That is a great MOC, you fit a lot of detail into a small footprint without it feeling crowded. Nice work!

Greetings Covenant84 There are a few places where you can find a few free steam building instructions, railbricks mentioned earlier (there are also some instructions in the magazine itself), and LGauge. You can also download the EN instructions from lego.com customer service. Even if you never plan on building these locomotives perusing the instructions will probably be helpful. There are also several articles in railbricks with tips on how to build various details on your steam engines. Oh, and there are several folks who sell instructions (Tony Sava for one). That locomotive you spotted is very detailed, hold off on something like that until build 4 or 5. Michael Gale has a web page with more of his lego works (but I don't think there are any steam engines there). Oh, one thing to notice on his engine are the custom rods. I THINK those were cut out of 1xN bricks, but I'm not sure. If this is all quite new to you, I'd suggest starting out with a modest first goal, e.g., building the EN in a different color or using my instructions to turn the lone ranger locomotive into something much more respectable. As for the lone ranger mod, no, you do not have to use my rods to do it, you should be able to also use similarly sized technic beams. Segueing into custom rods the two biggest things they bring are (1) aesthetically they get rid of all of the unnecessary holes in the technic beams, and (2) you can keep the rods thin for longer than 7 studs (the longest half width technic beam). You might want to hold off on custom rods until your 2nd or 3rd steam engine MOC (at least for me it too me that many tries before I got to something I liked how it ran). If you are heading in the direction of a pure MOC, I would strongly suggest that you start by building and refining a "sketch" with all of the mechanical gear to make sure you have all the clearances correct. Then test it on the roughest track you anticipate (e.g., laid out on top of a carpet). Oh, also what I found to be incredibly beneficial as I started getting into MOCs was the designer software, either Lego Digital Designer from lego.com or LDraw.org. It is great to have unlimited free bricks that you do not have to put away. Both tools are good, but also both have their frustrating parts. LDD forces you to obey physics... sometimes to the point where it will not let you build something that could be built. LDraw does not care if two items exist in the same space or if something is floating in thin air.

I've now lettered 20+ of my basic cars that I just use at shows for long trains. I only have shots of the gondolas at the moment, but I also did the coal hoppers and white tank cars. I will post those soon. Since these are meant to be generic cars that I might pull behind any locomotive I decided to use a generic railroad. Borrowing from the Lego themes, I modeled both the contemporary LRTS logo with the arrow and an older LRTS logo with a winged wheel. I am amazed at how much a little sticker adds to a simple car by giving it a focal point.

My track arrived today, only got the the R104 loop together so far. Here's a shot with my 52 stud long Superliners. On normal track they are one car per quarter turn. A few more pictures will show up here when moderated. I am happy to say that I have decided to quit attempting to build my own custom track for this much nicer alternative (though that actually happened when the Kickstarter campaign was funded). Here are a few videos of the train going at full speed in the curves, video 1, video 2, video 3. She would go flying off of normal lego curves at two or three speeds lower than this and even then she would slow in the curves, but not here.

That's crazy! I've got train cars shorter than the trucks on that engine. (wow!)

Oh, no disrespect, I'm just more familiar with the original books. In the first book, the Three Railway Engines, there was "a fat director" on board Henry's train when Henry refused to come out of the tunnel. This character quickly morphed into "the fat director", then in the forward of the third book, James the Red Engine, this character became the fat controller. It was not until after the last book in the original series that he became Sir Toppom Hat.

Oh wow, those look fantastic!

Wow, very nicely done. Are the two loops isolated from one another? (Then watching some of your other videos, you've got some neat rolling stock MOCs)

Cale, Duq, did you upset Santa in 2014??? In all seriousness though, drop mike44 a private message for an update. It sounds like they are swamped but they were also very responsive to my direct inquires.

When the HE was coming out I had argued in Eurobricks that I would have preferred 8 straight rails at the expense of a few of the minifigs. You'd have twins of all of the figs after buying the requisite pair of sets and would have to purchase a lot of stuff you did not want to be able to get the HE on straight track. I believe most lego sets have multiple production runs. They gauge the demand from the first run to plan the subsequent runs. There are a few obvious cases, e.g., the Star Wars sets that started out old gray and ended new gray and the Toy Story sets that had two different sized boxes. Other examples are the sets where the parts are updated. The EN also had a few revisions to the instructions over its span.

Will the one piece units simply be glued together by hand? Or ??? Any idea how much more they will cost? Looking at the track segments, if I were ballasting the track I'd probably do away with the sleepers altogether and put the track directly down on Nx6 or Nx8 plates. So far I have not cared much for ballast given the unrealistic tight curves. I fear these curves might make me change my mind. In the mean time, IF there were problems with heavy trains in an unballasted layout, I could see adding additional 2x2 plates to the outside rail between sleepers for added strength. The one fundamental problem with these curves is the fact that they enable longer, larger, and heavier trains. Man is that going to be expensive (grin). I am already contemplating an articulated steam engine.

Oh man, seeing the underside of the trucks that is great. I remain amazed that you pulled it off.

Oh wow! I was just tinkering with bluebrick last night to play with potential layouts for ME model's track and thought to myself, "gee, wouldn't be great if there were elements for the new radii". Thank you thank you Michael for the parts and Steve for sharing.

If you go that route, I'd suggest 2x the Horizon Express, it looks a little awkward with the locomotive on just one end.

Yes, if you trip over a black palm tree they are great stacks for steam engines. However, in this case I think the pin connector is closer to the actual profile (there is a slight expansion on the prototype, but to my eye it is closer to straight than to the angle of the palm tree). Also, inside the top of the palm tree is a stud facing up but fortunately it is a hollow stud. So you could use a bar or hose to connect to the downward facing stud from the dish. You might be able to fake it at 6.5 wide using "studs out" 1x6 or 1x8 tiles.

That's cool to know, Thomas and the other railway engines are a bit exotic over here in the US, they do not look much like our steam engines, but I remain amazed when looking though the original books how accurate they are to UK steamers. It is also neat to read the stories that clearly have their roots in actual events and to see the progression from "common locomotives" in the early books to an island with a benevolent Fat Controller who refuses to convert his steam locomotives in the later books. I believe the Thomas's in the US are hollow shells that were never actual steam engines. Reportedly after they were first built, the operator inside could move the eyes independently. A feature that has since been disabled.