zephyr1934

Oh no no no, it can't be that difficult to integrate a double bed into your lego layout. When I was in college I had a bed frame out of milk crates. Do something similar and you have all sorts of interesting things under your bed for the train to run through. Schaper toys in the US had a license to manufacture and sell playmobil in the early 1980's, so they might have been brought up rather than over.

So it does look like the long hood is 4 studs + 2 plates like the Maersk... but unfortunately, it also looks like it has the same high friction unpowered truck as the Maersk too.

Great build

Looking good. Meanwhile, it looks like the 9v crossover tracks are still available for about $20 on bricklink. Meanwhile, we were just talking about brickbuilt crossovers last year, here was a MOD I came up with.

very nice, and of course two of a kind is better than solo (grin)

It is unusual for a battery box to die (few moving parts), but not completely out of the question. I suspect the most likely thing to fail would be the connecting wire, followed by the motor. If you have a few spare parts you can test it, e.g., an extra connecting wire of any length, another motor or light, etc.. I'd suggest isolating the problem part first, then replace it. It is also possible that the battery box is good but the integrated IR receiver is bad... or your remote control is bad... or there is a loose/dead battery... or... etc. So a little trouble shooting is likely to help a lot. If it does turn out to be the battery box, there are a few available here, http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=55455c01 Good luck with your repairs

That is a great work of engineering to fit all of that into such a small space

Wow! You've managed to squeeze a heck of a lot of detailing into a small MOC. Excellent job!

Nice build and the prototype looks like it was just crying to be built in lego

On the simplest side, you could use plates without the half stud gap of domboy's solution (which I have also used) to connect the two different types of rails. So instead you would have a full stud gap between the 1 stud wide tie of the PF and the end of the 4.5v rail. Battery trains should be able to span a half stud gap from the end of the PF connectors to the start of the 4.5v rails. Just keep that gap at least one straight segment away from your curves or switches. If you are a heavy duty user, you might run into a few quirks. I have not done much with 4.5v rails, but I've looked at them. First off, they have teeth on the top of the rails which should help with pulling, but might shorten the life of the traction bands on the motors. Second off, I believe the current train wheels have a flange that is so large that the PF trains will ride on their flanges when on the 4.5v rails. Not necessarily a problem, but something to keep in mind (and can be quickly verified with a wheel set and some rails if it is a potential point of concern). I THINK the flanges on the motor wheels are smaller, so that the motors actually run on the top of the rail (again, something that could be quickly verified). You might want to get a single section of PF straight track and experiment with it. On a side note, I too have made a converter piece by cutting down a piece of straight track to be about 2 studs long (I bet flex track would be an even cheaper solution). I'm not concerned about preserving the 16 stud rail length, so this approach is feasible for me, but might not be for everyone. On a second side note, the 9v rails were originally sold as being backwards compatible with the 12v trains, in which case, the PF molds should be too. Though without the teeth on the rails, I would presume there is a slight loss of pulling power.

Could you instead find a right sized piece of conductive material like a small washer, piece of metal rod, or even a ball of tinfoil to bridge the unmodified gap?

Yes, surprisingly so given how well they looked to begin with. The hinges are a great piece to add texture. That sounds like a promising idea, I bet if you asked really nicely at the local bike shop they might even let you have an old flat tire for free.

Another possibility is to simply gear it down a lot more so that it turns really slow... like 1/2 the speed in your video or even slower. It would be prototypical but it would also get old quickly. The one problem I could see with micromotors is if the stop puts too much force on the retractable beam, a mircomotor might not be able to overcome it... or it might burn out prematurely. What about building stop points into the walls of the turntable pit, perhaps only for one direction, then have a 1-2 studs retractable portion under one end of the deck. If it is easier to make the stops so that it only aligns with one direction of rotation, when going the other way, you simply overshoot, extend the "stopper" and turn back.

Chuckles... From this angle you've nailed it spot on, about the only improvement I could see is if you could get the sides of the base down to 2 wide. While an older post, you've really captured the look of the depots of that day.

Welcome aboard Beralios (and the other new folks who recently posted), it will be great chatting more with all of you in the general forums. Meanwhile, MOC = My Own Creation, MOD = MODified set (or something similar)

Very nice! Perhaps you could use the other channel on the receiver to control a medium motor that raises/lowers a lever that slips in a groove whenever the turntable is perfectly aligned? Thereby preventing it from turning further. You would just have to quickly stop the turn table motor right after the lock engages.

I don't think the holes look too bad, real steam engines typically have holes all the way through the frame. There are all sorts of grebling you could stuff in the holes. The hard part to my eye is that gray brick with pins. Looks like it was never made in black, but a pair of used 1x2 with pin bricks in black can be had for a few pennies. The stock wheels will not take a rubber band, but a few people have cut a groove into them for that purpose. Unfortunately I could not turn up a link quickly. If I stumble over it I'll post more (or perhaps someone else will beat me to it)

LDD was designed for kids... which is not to say it is easy, but it is probably easier to pick up than LDraw. I personally like LDraw better, the user interface is more intuitive for me (personal preference) and you have greater control over the program (steeper learning curve). Fortunately you can try both for free and pick the one you like best.

Presumably someone at lego said, "hey, we can extract more money from these train heads if we bundle the track!" Without thinking that they would also turn away a number of fans as well. A few years ago in the ambassadors' forum TLG said the bundle was to keep the number of SKU's down. I suggested that they sell bags of track at S@H similar to the way the PF parts are packaged. One of the earlier ambassadors told me that lego produced the curves and straights in roughly equal numbers, so there is all sorts of craziness that could be going on behind the scenes.

Wow!

You could isolate both rails on the tracks leading in to the yard (for a completely reversible solution I've used a double layer of plastic packing tape stuck to itself and cut to size and stuck in the joint where two segments come together) and then use either one or two polarity switches with a pair of track connector wires to swap the yard polarity. Though you might have to use multiple power drops in the yard to get power everywhere. You would just have to stop while on the turn around track, swap polarity, then continue.

Hey, wait, you missed a spot... I think I saw a little bit of floor in the corner (grin). No, in all seriousness, very impressive.

Wow! That's a great looking 44 tonner. And you went and answered almost all of the question that came to mind except one. Where did you wind up stashing the actual IR receiver after stripping it out of its casing? Looking at the prototype, one thing you might want to do is put a red cheese brick on the running boards on either side of the cab, to capture the taper of the original. Still, it would be great to have this loco split off into its own thread so that it gets indexed in the MOC index. Both the mechanicals and the aesthetics are great. On second though, maybe wait until you are finished, then post a new thread.

Thank you thank you thank you. At least from the picture of the blue train it looks like it uses the old style train windows in the doors, if so that should make many folks happy (too bad it is in trans blue instead of clear though). The front windows look like an update of this part, only reduced to two bricks tall, just he windows. If so, probably an improvement now that we have the corresponding bricks to go below. I wonder what the locomotive looks like behind the cab, does it narrow back to a 4 wide hood or does it stay the width of the cab? I'm guessing the latter so that they can stash the PF bits, but... maybe they do like the maersk and go to 4 wide+ 2 snotted tiles. The two pictures of the passenger train each show a single car, but there might be a third car between them. It would be a shame if it were only two cars. Although it is not completely clear, it does look like there is a cab on both ends of the train. I personally like the current red passenger train better than these pictures (it looks like a nice regional train), but it is good that lego is changing things up.

You did a good job capturing the look of the prototypes