zephyr1934

You just need super wide radius curve then (grin) Oh, good point, there might be a few flags or other very thin parts that MIGHT work. Or perhaps using battle droid arms (30377) you could get a door that does not have the right motion but does have the two correct stopping points. If it is possible, I bet it would be very tricky to do. Hum... maybe snotted hinge bricks right at the edge of the door would work to get the door to open in.

"I have no idea why it started working" said the father holding a file behind his back (grin). No, in all seriousness though, that is commendable. You might be able to get it to work by adding one more plate below and dropping only those offending bits down (or using shims- cut up lego boxes if you want to be pure).

The car looks fantastic. I love all the detail you got on the roof and underside (1x1 round tile on 1x1 round plate looks so good). Could have been an O gauge model. The one odd quirk about this vintage of passenger cars is that the doors opened inward, e.g., this one. I have no idea how you could build that at this scale though, the doors themselves are two parts (top and bottom), then the trap door lifts up and clicks into the lower half of the door, while the stairs fold down. Very complicated mechanism, but I digress. Your doors are as good as anything that could be done in lego (at least as far as I am aware of) and they are a nice homage to some of the recent sets (EN, HE)

Wow (he he heh)

I don't have LDD on this computer, but from the video it is clear that that crossover is an insane piece of engineering. Great work. Oh, and BTW, the couplers with plow have that problem on normal track too (well, not when it is perfectly flat, but it is so close to the top of the rail that any small bump in the floor or what not will cause it to drag).

Wow, you did a great job capturing the prototype, lots of great details in that build.

I don't know, it looks WAY too good to be a set.

No, ME never was able to get the curves to work the first time around. They were listed as coming soon for a long time. The straights sold out, but I think they were all from one run. They had problems, which is why it took so long to come back. It takes a lot of engineering to get the rails working right- right dimensions, making the metal-plastic connection work, making the rail joints work, ensuring the gauge is perfect, etc. etc.. Lots of stupid things can go wrong.

I still really like the full scale car, but yes, it probably would look horrible on a standard lego curve. The 0.5 versions look to be a really great lego scale car. Seeing the whole set together looks great. It strikes me as a UK version of the super chief cars (which are among my favorite lego sets). Looking good

Excellent! About the only thing I could think of to top this is if somehow you could get a little gear action up from the trucks to make the giraffes bounce while the train moves along

The new station and passenger train just appeared on S@H in the US, no sign of the freight train yet. Neat to see them side by side. It does show some of the lazyness of the lego designs (stick with what worked), but it also does look like they could be on the same railroad. Too bad the new one doesn't have the gray wheels though.

Wow, that is an excellently detailed building of a common train and in a common color no less. Very well played. It looks like 7725 is finally all grown up.

I did not mean to stir up trouble. I see lego doing a good job following the market over the past decade since they moved management out of the family. I personally do not like all of the directions that the market is pushing them, but the idea of staying afloat much less turning a great profit in toys in this age is amazing in itself. And indeed, I might be wrong about creator. It does not seem to get much publicity, but it might just be one of the core themes. Thinking about the isles at the toy stores it does have about as much shelf space as the other large themes. Creator is certainly my favorite of the current lines. I think the train theme has always been targeted towards kids more than adults, with occasional tangents meant to pull the parent in (e.g., 12v introducing the screw down holes to the ties, with all of the remote controls, etc.), or occasional gross simplification (e.g., everyone's favorite, 7897). The Super Chief was a return to some of the crossover ideas from 12v and those continue with EN/M/HE (with a brief stumble with the hobby train- a great idea with lots of great AFOL input, but hobbled from being all it could be by lego corporate... they are slowly learning to understand AFOLs). In that vein, if trends mean anything, I would bet the next AFOL train will be steam freight (steam->diesel->electric->next; passenger->frieght->passenger->next). Probably nothing larger than a x-6-x (both because the mold is 4:2 flanged to blind and because larger than that is hard to make robust enough for the tight curves to include in a set)

Indeed, check out this thread for plenty of inspiration. Though don't be intimidated, you can do a lot with a bit of tape to isolate track sections and a couple of pole reversers to power/de-power your blocks, e.g., here.

I think we all should commend ME and BBB for their efforts with tracks. Both of them ran into small problems and big problems with their prototypes. You have to anticipate EVERYTHING or be prepared to make an entire new round of tooling. Not a cheap gamble. If ME gets it right this time out I bet you can count on their track being available for quite some time. I am so looking forward to the prospect of the wide radius curves.

The simplicity of the conversion makes total sense. The 9v system was designed to be backward compatible with 4.5v/12v and the PF was designed to be mostly backward compatible with 9v (with the exclusion of metal rails). So the motors take up similar profiles while PF requires more space inside. Meanwhile here's an example going the other way.

The Creator sets were introduced because enough folks were complaining about the fact that lego sets had become too much of a "model" and not enough of a "construction" set. There is still a large contingent of customers who emphasize the construction aspect. So we have the creator line. As an ambassador I suggested that they toss in a plain minifig with some of the house creator sets, to give the kids a focal point. They did that once and it took off. Now they are starting to put in more and more specalized figs and some of the creator sets are starting to look more like city sets (I am still not pleased with the distinction of "creator expert" on the former DTC sets, since the basic creator sets have three different models while the DTC sets have a single model). Lego does very extensive market research, they have a good idea of what will sell and how much they can sell it for. If it doesn't make money, they won't do it. Although creator is probably my favorite over all theme (particularly if someone asks me gift advice), Creator probably is far from the most important product line in lego's book. I suspect the various licensed themes are top of that list. Oh, I am not arguing any right or wrong about what lego is doing. I'm just saying that the contemporary sets are much more "build only one thing". I don't think that is lego's choice, they are following the market demands. While the sets are geared towards children, they are doing a good job exploiting the resale market to still make the parts available to AFOLs. Various train specific parts come out in all sorts of strange sets (e.g., the black cow catcher piece first came out in a ninjago set)

Well there is certainly prescient for specialized nose cones 10 and 20 years ago... ... all of the pros and cons have been reiterated. They make it look more train-like than could be done with regular bricks and does so for a lot less weight than any brick built solution would be. On the other hand, it is taking a step away from the historical "only rectangular bricks" that persisted to the early 1980's and is moving towards a single model set. It is the constant struggle, is lego a model that you happen to construct or is it a construction set that you happen to build models with? Right now the corporate answer is "whichever sells the best." For us there is no wrong answer (well, maybe "megabloks" but short of that...). So if you do not like the new passenger train take the "model" and turn it into a beautiful construction- how do you do a brick built nose that works so perfectly? Or maybe just borrow and repaint the brick built nose from one of the other passenger trains. Or ignore the sets altogether and build the trains of your dreams. I'm just glad they are still producing train parts.

That looks like a good, sound design. You got a lot of slopes and details that usually get cut (e.g., the slope of the frame under the cab and the cab roof). At least the red small train wheels look to be non-existant parts.

Wow, great build and to see it run, all I can say is that it is also an impressive work of engineering.

Ingenious! Perfect from start to finish.

That's a fantastic build, you did a great job capturing the essence of the original.

Very nice!

Looking fantastic! And like the others, I think it would be really neat to see a video of her running.

Looks great, though I think you got the ratio of books to lego backwards (grin). The idea of including the bridge is a good one. You might wind up with a few more of those multilayer MOCs before you are done.