zephyr1934

You even built the pointless arrow! I'm still partial to all of those phase 3 cars. Definitely keep the posts coming as you progress on your rolling stock. Meanwhile, that terminal is still fantastic.

Congratulations ME, and like everyone else who backed this drive, I am looking forward to a high quality product! I can't wait to get my hands on the wide radius curves, R104 here I come. Good point, while at the moment I do actually have enough straight for my needs, I just upped my pledge to get a sample pack of ABS and of metal to play with and see how they perform. When I started my effort to make custom wide radius curves I had wanted to use 1x8 ties. Unfortunately there is no good way of doing the track connectors on curves with regular Lego plates. Even BanBao with mostly one wide ties uses a 2 wide joiner when the rail sections come together. Personally I think all 2 wide looks better than mostly 1 wide ties with occasional 2 wide. The nice thing about the ME design, however, is that as long as you do not mind having two plate high ballast, you can create the look of 1 wide ties. Say you wanted black ties and light gray ballast, where ME uses a 2x8 plate, use a black 1x8 plate and a gray 1x8 plate. For the rail junctions use the underlying plates for the structure to hole the rails together (hum... maybe that will get me to finally ballast my track). You could even get fancy and use tiles for the ties, though now you would use a pair of 1x1 tiles for the outside, a 1x4 for the inside, and a pair of 1x1 plates to actually hold the rail (again using the underlying plate for the structure). If this idea proves popular, perhaps in the future ME could add custom plates to facilitate this type of ballast on curves (though they would need one new wedge plate for each radius... or two new wedge plates to support "S" curves)

WOW! Very nice to see all of the detail (the photos here are only a small taste of the flickr shots). And you have it right down to the giant toddler wandering the streets (that freaked me out last time I was in Buffalo, grin). In all seriousness though, I like the fact that you are also building in the details of the track work. You'll have fun dropping of the RPO cars and such. Also neat little tidbits in the background (phase 3 duplex sleeper? A nice looking steamer)

Great to see it run

All sorts of great detailing throughout and the interior of the engine shed is well done.

Looking good

He he he... yes indeed, the LDD render of the coach with the locomotive looks more true to life than the photo of the real train with the tank engine pulling the coaches.

The car is a nice looking design. Though I would agree, it will likely look out of proportion with the 6 wide locomotive. Though I think it will also look a little long compared to the loco too. If so, perhaps save this design for a larger locomotive and look for a nice two axle truck design for this loco? Another thing to keep in mind with this car design, it looks to be about 40 studs long, and cars this long look awkward on standard lego curves (see the before pictures in my thread on custom track to see what 40 and 50 stud long cars look like in normal lego curves). It will also require extra power to pull it satisfactorily through the curves.

Doh! Yep, I was distracted by the switches to the roundhouse in the schematic, the ones on the right and in the photo are modified (but for the better). Still looks good and is a good use of the space

That is a great layout that maximizes the constraints of the unmodified track geometries. Meanwhile, your realization looks great, the ballast and ties look really sharp. (the new train wagon is great too)

Excellent job capturing the essence of the original. Looking great!

Nice MOD (of a MOD of a MOD... grin)

Excellent! A very fine looking locomotive and so far a good looking MOC.

Bricklink tends to be a lot cheaper than lego S@H for parts 95% of the time, e.g., 1x2 bricks are $0.15 and 2x4 bricks are $0.30 at lego, but most 1x2's will be below $0.05 and 2x4's below $0.20 on bricklink (except rare colors). New sets will usually be cheaper at S@H though.

Wow! She's a beauty, the cars are fantastic, and the photos are excellent. Fantastic attention to details at every level.

PS, I forgot to mention, the white "tires" on the train wheels look sharp. You have a steady painting hand.

Thanks for the kind words (of course I am only one of many members in the club so I say this on behalf of the club). I'll bump this thread as I post more shows.

Greetings Redimus, from your first post it sounds like you are buying most of your parts from Ebay, no? Have you discovered bricklink yet? If not, be careful, it is highly addictive. The lone ranger engine isn't bad if you modify it, e.g., as per this thread (scroll down and you will see alternatives to using the custom rods too). Like others have indicated, getting the mechanicals working well on your first steam engine can be a killer, especially if you do not have any pieces to try it out with. I'd suggest starting with the mechanicals from an existing engine (e.g., get the instructions for the Emerald Night from lego customer service- just search for the set number on their web page). Then if you like the EN, build it in a different color. Or if you do not like the EN, just build the running gear and figure out design for the rest of the engine that is more appealing to you. There are more sets of instructions on Railbricks and LGauge, probably elsewhere too. Happy building! PS, few builders also either share their steam designs here, e.g., Murdoch17, or sell them in various venues. So also keep an eye on the posts for more leads.

I hate table dives when you are at a show. First you have to find all of the pieces (since of course you did not bring any spares) and then you have to remember how in the heck you built the model in the first place. So far I've been lucky, found all of the parts and they went back together in under half an hour (including a couple of steam engines). Only one broken piece in one dive- a bogie plate lost its pin. Still, a lot better than when a conventional model train goes over... it usually never comes back.

It's a great looking engine. I would agree with Tony that the cylinders would look better in black. Ideally lower but I doubt it is feasible to do so, so a necessary compromise (if only someone was making wide radius curves... oh, wait, ME is in a different thread). To my eye the tubing looks more like the running boards than a hand rail, then the crack between the two curved slopes captures the visual line that the hand rail would make. So I think it already works. As for the fuel bunker on the Vanderbilt tender, I like using wedges mixed with tiles, e.g., here. Great work, keep on steaming!

I'd suggest either the current red passenger train (more appropriate for a branch line and it has all the pf components already) or a copy of the lone ranger train and redo the cars to your liking. Then whichever set you go with, slowly over time add your own touches to improve upon the design and turn it into a MOC. Your post also mentioned that you were building a large station. If so, park the existing HE on one of the other tracks for decoration.

I've fallen 3-4 years behind on posting photos from shows. Rather than wait for clearing the backlog, I'll post the most recent show and then fill in the rest as time allows. This lot is from GTE Columbus, 2014. Personal favorites are the double headed northern's, both with working valve gear (above) and my expanded fleet of GM Fishbowl buses. Enjoy...

Looking good!

Welcome aboard. Yes, although it doesn't look like any specific train, the model definitely has a strong "TRAIN" feel to it with interesting features all over. The two suggestions that come to mind are, first, the robot arms sticking out of the side. It looks like those are to hold a hand rail like on the Maersk train or BNSF, right? On a real train those are the hand rails for the running boards. But the body of this train goes out to the edge of the frame (presumably with the walkway inside, like some trains). If so, then I'd suggest removing those robot arms and maybe replace them with vertical hand grips near the front and rear to help the crew up and down the steps on the ends. Second, the color scheme seems a little disjoint. Railroads tend to go either for flashy with lots of colors or utilitarian with few colors. So if you built it mostly in black it would look more the latter, or if you found a way to bring a deliberate, well defined color change in then it would look more like the former. It sounds like you built it first then rendered it. So in this case, perhaps just repainting the virtual model. In any event, looking good.

I love it, you need a volt meter to play lego... he he he (yeah, I know there are all sorts of impressive microprocessor tricks going on, I just like the photo taken out of context)