zephyr1934

Nice!

Oooo, the dark orange looks nice

A great MOC (never mind the fact that it is your first train) and congratulations on hitting the front page on Eurobricks! You could try a 4L bar or cut down 3mm tubing to a different length. While I'm not familiar with the prototype, what about bringing one pantograph down a LITTLE bit, as if it were on the wire but the wire was closer to the top of the locomotive and then put the other pantograph folded all the way down? FWIW, I like the bright red for the pantograph, but it's all a matter of personal taste

Welcome Lwol564! And a very nice MOC you've got there. Why don't you start a new thread for the MOC so that you can give more background on the locomotive and all the interchange will be together in its own place

The ideal solution would have been just a pair of OE cars with no locomotive at all and then separately have a nice Euro locomotive set (e.g., bring back the crocodile). That way OE could have the cars that they wanted, fans could buy more than two cars without having surplus locomotives (I'm looking at you EN), and everyone would be happy. But that would have been one SKU too many for the Lego bean counters and their optimization. Lego originally released the Super Chief locomotive on its own, with no cars (and no motor, but you could buy that separately). Then 6 months later released matching cars originally designed by a fan (via a predecessor to Ideas).

Great job!

The ball bearing wheels are AMAZING, you'll be able to build a lot longer trains before you need stronger magnets. I don't know what color is closest to Maersk blue (besides itself of course), what I thought was interesting is that even Lego didn't bother trying to match it perfectly.

Very nice! And I like how you routed the cable, very clever. You have quite the wildlife problem on your railroad. The green MOD is a great touch too. Good call, I didn't think there was room to do so with this approach but now that I squint I think I can see how you might have done it. I've been wrestling with getting two weight bricks in, but it requires mounting the motor lower. More on that idea when I have time to build. Though seeing how effective this build is, a pair of weight bricks might be overkill.

The 10219 Maersk train is indeed an amazing set. The one thing to be mindful of is that the technic axle trucks on the locomotive have a lot of friction. Ball bearing wheel sets can solve that problem though. Interestingly, in the most recent Maersk branded set (10241 Triple-E from 2014) Lego dropped Maersk blue and used medium azure instead

That would definitely help with the relative height between the engine and cars.

First off, apologies my previous post probably did not come off the way I intended. The instructions are fantastic and thank you for sharing. My experience with crown gears like this has not been great, but it was due to shattering the gears with an XL motor trying to pull too much weight rather than the gears coming loose. I typically over engineer my structures, my default is to lock the axles together to keep them from pulling apart, hence my comment. That is very reassuring that you have experience with this design. You might want to add 1-2 sentences in the instructions describing the fact that this is a proven design (as you did in your response above), I can't be the only knob out there. And if it works, there is not a need to lock the motor in. So do you think the bushings are not needed either? For overly cautious people like me, I would just toss them in whether or not the instructions said to. For people who don't know, as long as it works fine with out the bushings no harm and you save them a few cents in parts. And yes, I meant the dark gray technic bricks inside the smoke box. It's like when the lego designers build something inside a structure that you'll never see. It gave me a smile while building the set when I realized what they did. Completely non-functional and only seen while building.

The fundamental problem is that the EN was built for a lower car than the OE cars. Aesthetically you are spot on, but at that point it would need a complete reworking to lower them, which would disrupt the interior. From the perspective that this is a set of passenger cars that has a locomotive tossed on as an afterthought, the locomotive probably needs to adapt to meet the cars. Entry level AFOL- buy the crocodile and call it a day Someone just starting to MOD sets- keep the locomotive mostly unchanged but get a motor in there. Someone comfortable with acquiring parts and working from instructions- MOD the EN or find instructions for a more compatible locomotive (I'm sure it is only a matter of weeks if not days until we start seeing those appear) Medium MOCer- build a better engine Expert MOCer- the OE is a parts pack to build some seriously awesome cars (longer and maybe lower) and match it to an equally nice locomotive MOC (could be pre-existing) Okay, I think StijnD (the designer of the MOC/MOD) did an amazing job reverse engineering most of the elements that the Lego designers probably did for motorization that led to the shape of this locomotive. I see three problems with this design, two are minuscule the other is only a small problem. does not have bushings to keep the crown gears in place, but they can easily be added did not preserve the "boiler tubes" in the smokebox, but this unseen detail could easily be added back in if someone wants it does not have anything locking the motor to the drivers, e.g., a technic beam. As built there is a risk that the motor could "pop up," disengaging the top crown gears. By moving the motor forward one stud there's probably room to build something in, but it would also increase the number of new parts needed (which I suspect StijnD was trying to minimize)

Very nice. The EN looks a little short height-wise next to the new cars, but still better than the OE loco. I wonder if you could use the curved slopes with stripes that came with the OE and obviously, use the rods from the OE. Update some of the EN cheese slopes with curved slopes that were not available back then. There is also some nice detailing in the OE cab that would be good to carry over. I also wonder how hard it would be to raise the EN boiler and cab one brick.

Oh, sorry, I make custom rods (grin). Here's a comparison of the parts, Lego on top my rods below

Fixed it... (grin)

Phew! It's like waking up from a bad nightmare

I made the trek to my local Lego store and got the set today. So far I've only built the locomotive. It is a quirky build, in both good and bad ways. One neat little feature is that when you take the smoke box door off it looks like the engine has boiler tubes. The combination of one bushing and one 42610 wheel between the frame on each driver axle is also a good one, they give just the right spacing so that the axles are loose on the inside while still doing a good job of keeping the axle from sliding left/right. Also interesting that (if I recall correctly) the drive rods have a copyright 2022 on them, so the design has been around for a little while.

Thanks (Toastie) and !@#$%$ (Lego) They could have made it PU ready but not included the electronics, that's what they've done with every AFOL locomotive since the Super Chief... well, I guess that's redundant, every AFOL locomotive. Just look at the way they over-engineered the propulsion for the EN, a bunch of double bevel gears, I bet using the normal bevel gears for the anticipated loading is not allowed by the lego police.

Didn't the official GUI for the crocodile use the SetSpeed functionality of the L motor? I had not even thought about the possibility that it isn't the default mode (having horrible performance from bluetooth at shows I'm mostly in PF)

Plastruct (or something like that) makes ABS architectural elements for modelers (both RR and architects), including an I beam that makes a nice lego rail. But it is a major hassle to maintain the gauge on curves, etc. So can be done, but a lot harder than I would think it should be. The cheapest track solution I've seen is one where someone took decking material, ripped it down to maybe 1/4" strips and glued it together with wooden spacers to get the right gauge. I think they filled their entire back yard with it. This might be it... The cheapest "lego-like" solution are the Chinese clones, which can be found all over ebay, amazon, etc.

Maybe that went unsaid by lego, "any solution that disrupts the car interiors was forbidden by the IP owners"

Good idea, another option would be a tender long enough to have two train motors underneath, but that will be over 20 studs so it might be difficult to make it fit well with the locomotive. Which leads to yet another option- keep your locomotive and tender unchanged, instead put another train motor under one of the cars.

The PF XL motor in the cab should be enough to pull anything that is light enough it will not break the magnetic couplers. So what might be best for you is a dead 9v motor (with the motor removed but electrical intact) as a power pickup for a PF XL motor in the EN cab. Other folks have fit two L motors in the boiler, which is another option.

At BW 2022 Michael sounded like he is aiming for the motors to be maintainable. While a lot of time has passed and I'm sure the designs have evolved a dozen times since then, at the time the motor had a bogie plate on top, so if you broke a pin it would be cheap to repair. I bet he has something similar in mind for the motors, burn it out and you only replace the broken part for a lot less than a new motor. But that is pure speculation on my part. The case should be screwed together, so even if he does not design it as such, it should be easier to replace the motor than the original lego versions.

The EB storage is meant for your avatar and maybe footer graphics. You should host your photos on flickr (or similar) and then link to them from your posts. Well... one way... the plastic axles (grin), but seriously though, yes, still in the same ballpark