zephyr1934

I must say great work! Now quit being so wonderfully productive, you're making the rest of us look bad (grin).

Wow, that looks really great. Getting all of the detail on the sides is a lot of work. I like how you were able to hide the top of the drivers. I was going to suggest lowering the black on the cab roof by half a plate to hide the transition to the blue slopes, but that probably would not be easy to do... and then you lose the continuity with the top of the boiler.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up from the floor. That is an incredible build, and the attention to detail is over the top (even the underside of the platforms... nothing escaped you... except perhaps the safety telephones... that was the first thing I noticed (grin)). Even before seeing codefox421's question I too was wondering if you could post a shot or two of the relief above the tunnel portals in this photo?

Oh wow! Seeing it complete, that is really a beautiful piece of work. It is great to see all the detailing on the classic American depots from the golden age of rail passenger service. Oh, and the expanding Amtrak fleet is a nice touch as well.

Fortunately for me, ever since lego move away from pre-colored granules, there is enough color variation that they have created a fairly large range of color that one could match. So that is exactly what I am aiming for, a color that is within the lego variabilty. Meanwhile, I checked the colors and I think another 5-6 are close enough. I don't remember exactly which ones, but red brown is among those that seemed close enough. I'll drop you a PM and we can discuss further.

Could the winning designs somehow be leveraged with cuusoo+bricklink, as per here?

Apologies, I did not mean to side track your thread. I was just trying t say that you could have gone even more obtuse with the running gear. Having kicked the can of worms open, it's been a few years since I've played with it. I tried two approaches and I don't remember which was the final one. One used bevel gears and a vertical axle the other used a rubber band with a 90 degree twist. While sufficient to move the engine and a few wooden trains, neither approach was very strong. I'll try to remember to pull the engine out over the holidays and post more in a different thread.

Thanks for the kind words, after taking this plunge I would agree that the decals (not just mine, but any decals actually) can really add that pop to a MOC. Meanwhile, you would be surprised just how messed up I can get it. However, I am dealing with Pantone emulation on my computer rather than the ACTUAL colors. When I use the Pantone, CMYK and RGB values for a single lego color from the Peeron Color Chart I get very different colors on my screen. I suspect I could print them from my computer and get a pretty good match since presumably the emulation accounts for my OS etc, but the emulation gets lost as I transfer the files. Since my software will not output the correct Pantone color, I then tried converting that back to CMYK. I tried 10-20 different lego colors. Most I have not yet had time to evaluate. Of the six colors that I have looked at, the three dark colors from my last post came out close enough for my tastes while I will need to try again on yellow, blue and light blay. In any event, the Peeron Chart was a great starting point. Now I just need to fine tune. I think reddish brown was on my test sheet but I have not compared it to a real brick yet. I'll check to see how well it turned out. I am certainly open to the possibility of others helping me refine this process.

I've finally caught up to the forum and now it is time for an update on this project. I finished lettering the MOCs from my first round of printing. These include the C&NW bilevel commuter cars (more here), Milwaukee Road 261 (more here) Southern Pacific 2472 (more here) and my MN&S switchers (more here, including a very blocky prior attempt from almost 10 years ago of the same locomotives) Meanwhile, the custom decals are highly addictive. After my first run I saw several things I would have wanted to do differently or better. So of course this lead to a second run. First, the "Z" curve on the white stripe near the nose in the above locomotives came from the second run. As I had posted in another thread, one of the biggest motivating factors arose from the North Coast Limited. I had already applied home printed decals for the windows on the locomotives. The black decals on dark green bricks simply were very hard to see. Now that the lettering has been applied, those windows became the next thing on my list. The result are the new windows in the following photo (with more here), The black porthole windows are only part of the story. I wanted to see if I could match the green and make transparent windows. I found a pretty close match for dark green, red, and blue (more here). I planned on trying them out on one of the North Coast Limited locomotives, but then I discovered that I would have to completely redo the design to eliminate structural 6x10 plates to make room for actual windows. So maybe another day I will get to that. Instead, I upgraded one of my Milwaukee Road F7's (obviously a MOD from the Super Chief) to use dark red porthole windows (more here) I am still working on a color match for other lego colors. I also threw together two sets of reporting marks for North American freight cars.

That is a really great build and hard to believe it is your first steam engine. It also does a good job capturing the look of the poster (of course now you have to build those coaches too... grin). In all seriousness, it looks really good. One suggestion, above the last driver wheel, did you consider using 1x2x1 curved slope in place of the cheese and tile on the leading edge? One word of warning (which you probably have already thought of), with three axles the tender might prove to be problematic in curves, especially if you increase the spacing between axles. There are various tricks you can to to make the middle axle "float" or articulated so that it will negotiate curves without problems (or just pop the axle out and keep the wheel holder to create the illusion of a third axle).

This is a great MOC of a deceptively difficult to build in brick prototype... ... just look at all of that snot to get everything in the right place. Your head must be spinning (grin)... mine would be. It is neat to see the progression in the design as you are going along.

I was going to say, you really should start building those 100+ freight cars (grin). It will look great at the head of a passenger train. Looking good (really good given the limitations of lego curves). From the photos I noticed that you put the two IR receivers in the walkway on the long hood. Are they set to the same channel or different channels? How well does it respond to the controller?

Great (virtual) build of a commonplace workhorse. It is models like this that help create a rich collection.

Oh, I don't know, you could go further... ... but then you would really upset the engineers... though there is historical prescience.

Oh wow oh wow oh wow. Oh, and did I mention that that is a great train? Indeed, a fantastic revisit and update to the topic of 7740.

If you like the general design of a set but don't care about NIB, I'd suggest downloading the instructions, get a copy of LDraw or LDD, and cad the train up in a new color. I think I have seen the EN built in black, red, regular green, brown, and blue. The reason I suggest doing a CAD first is that you might have to (or in some case want to) make modifications to the design. Of course if you are a better "by hand" builder, you can make it work that way too, though to save money, you could use place-holder pieces for temporarily holding the spot of parts you have yet to order. In any event, as you are building, keep an eye on bricklink to make sure you do not use non-existent or stupid-expensive parts (as well as your collection... in case you might already have some of those rare parts)

Oh wow, another beautiful build. Very well done with lots of clever concealment to hide the PF, which in itself is impressive. I like all of the details built into the MOC, especially the attention you paid to the cab. I do hope you have wide radius curves either already in hand or coming soon. This engine is too nice for standard lego curves (all the more impressive that it can negotiate them without problems) Given the size of your two respective builds, I would think they would almost be touching one another already (grin).

That's a great job hiding everything, hardly a spare micron unused inside that MOC. Lots of nice little features too, e.g., the rods and the retro 12v cylinders. Did you think about doing the wheels in red?

That's a great build and unbelievable for your first train MOC. Well done. You should have no problem pulling 10 cars with a pair of XL's as long as your engine is heavy enough to keep the wheels from spinning on the track. In fact you should have little problem doing so with just one XL. With a pair of XL motors you will first have problems with the magnets pulling apart (might happen around 10 cars if they are heavy or high friction) and once you solve that, you will have problems with the locomotive pulling the cars off of the track in curves (but that typically happens above 30 or 40 cars).

You can find the details of the stickers in this thread (and I will be updating it as soon as I catch up on all of the other threads) Yes, at various times the NP had F3's, F7's and I think F9's on this train and I aimed for the F7's (not sure you can tell them apart at the resolution of lego, but the numbers are a giveaway). Meanwhile, I can't believe you attempted this train back then when sand green had such a small number of parts, nice job. There were several critical elements for my build that came out since 2008. I wanted to build this train for some time, but I was waiting for sand green cheese before attempting this model and then the 1x3 tiles proved invaluable for getting the vestibules the way I wanted them. Can't wait to see your update.

Indeed, you do not have to live in a single size. Most of my trains are 6 wide (I personally think that goes better with the standard lego curves) but most of my steam engines are 8 wide + wider cylinders (though I did sneak one 6 wide steamer in that could easily be converted to PF). I typically use an 8 wide cab, stepping to a 7 wide tender, and then to 6 wide cars. Even when staying in 6 wide my old stuff looks stubby next to my newer trains. So perhaps start building a few new trains in 8 wide to see how you like it (the extra detailing can't be beat). Then as you want to pull older trains over, do so. But converting a MOC from 6 wide to 8, in most cases you will likely be largely starting from scratch anyway. As for instructions, there are eight wide models both in the RailBricks magazine and in the instructions section. There MIGHT be eight wide on L-gauge too. In any event, as others have said, borrow ideas from models you like and try to reverse engineer some of them.

These days even a cheap windows laptop seems to do a good job for the LDraw family of tools. The good old days could be found again. Your models are way too good for Lego to ever turn into a set... but even after Lego simplified one of your designs I bet it would give the creator trains stiff competition.

Branching off of this thread into a new topic, and I have long thought that it would be wonderful to have a part inventory for the currently available lego train sets to use in LDD and see if the AFOLs could come up with something better than what comes in the box. There could even be the possibility for a competition for the best MOC from a given train set.

While I remain tickled by how much better this train looks lettered, after adding the stickers there were several things I wanted to fix. At the top of the list was this photo featured in my original post: When I first built the train (long before doing the lettering) I had already applied home printed decals for the windows on the locomotives. The black decals on dark green bricks simply were very hard to see. Now that the lettering had been applied, those windows all of a sudden stuck out like a sore thumb. I was fine with the black, but now that I could make stickers with lighter colors I wanted to add contrast. So I added a ring of light gray around the windshield and porthole windows then tossed in dark gray wiper blades for extra detail. and in detail, also, when laying out the first print run, I accidentally omitted half of the car numbers (there should have been two numbers per side and I only printed one per side). Those have now been fixed but I did not take any photos.

You have some incredible builds. Seeing all of that NH equipment reminds me of this book with tons of hand drawn sketches of train yard work from the late 50's. PS, just FYI, you might want to use links to photos on flickr rather than posting photos to EB. You will quickly run out of storage space on EB.