zephyr1934

looking good

Yes, from your description I too would suspect the IR receiver first, but probably worth a few tests before calling lego. If you have a spare IR receiver, see if the problem goes away when swapping them. If you don't have a spare, you could try swapping the red/blue outputs and see if the problem stayed with the given output, or with the given set of plugs. Finally, you could try removing the IR receiver altogether and use the speed control built in the rechargeable battery.

I didn't think of that before, but now that you mention it, oh yeah, I can totally see your tender design being a problem in the curves. You should do some more isolation work to figure out exactly where the problem is (I'll give you some suggestions on that in a second). First, though, looking closer at your tender design, I see at least three problems, 1) the trucks are very long, something like 12 or 13 studs, so each truck will have a hard time going through the tight lego curves for that reason alone. 2) the trucks are also three axle, which will also tend to bind up in lego curves even if you make them as short as possible. 3) the wheels all still have the traction band on them, the inside and outside rails will try to turn the wheels at different speeds on a curve, without traction bands one or the other wheel can slip, but with the traction bands they are locked to both rails. I would suggest pulling off those trucks and setting them aside for a moment, then build a nice and simple two axle truck that is about 1/2 the length (and do so without the traction bands- a tooth pick is great for pulling them off). As it is 8 or 9 studs is probably the limit that I'd recommend for a wheelbase if you want to negotiate conventional lego curves. If that works, you can then start adding details back in, testing each time to see if it works. If you have to do a major rebuild on your tender each time, you could start out using a simple flatcar of the same dimensions, and perhaps add a roll of coins to simulate the weight of the full brickbuilt tender. (Or if you REALLY like the look of those trucks, perhaps building two versions of the tender, the "pretty but only for display" tender and the "well, I've made a few sacrifices but it runs well" tender.) Now to get the look of the three axle trucks, you could then explore either articulated trucks, a floating axle truck, or a dummy wheel. As for the locomotive running gear, that is an easy thing to test. You could pull off the connecting rod to the cylinder (without redesigning anything), if that helps then you know your cylinder is a potential problem, if it doesn't help, you know your cylinder design should be okay. If the problem only occurs in the curves, it is more likely to be related to something that actually touches the tracks (the wheels). Oh, another handy trick for debugging problems like this is simply to watch and see where the train starts to slow down. If the problem is the tender, the locomotive should be completely in the curve without any sign of slowing. You could even uncouple the locomotive while keeping the power attached, if it happily goes forward/back with the few inches of slack in the wire, well, you know you've isolated the gremlin. Good building!

Some fantastic builds there, and great use of the finger nail grooves on the jumper plates, it looks stupendous.

The engine looks like a great build.

A very creative build, with hints of some of the insane steam engine builds from the 1990's when there weren't nearly as many specialized parts.

I already replied to many of these questions a few months ago, but seeing these responses I have a few counter replies. 8 & 9) I would not blame the parents. I would blame marketing, toy companies are pushing more complicated toys to younger children. So the intelligent trains were probably targeted towards 6 yr olds (e.g., set 2745 from 1996 is 3-6, while the newer trains are 2-5). Now some of the city sets are marketed to 5 yr olds. Not unique to Lego though, e.g., I recall playing with fisher price little people until 5+, but by 3 our kids were tired of them. All of the traditional toy companies have to compete with the tablet and video game effects. Oh, and just try to find a G rated movie in the theater these days. It's not easy being young any more. 10) lego is bending backwards to idiot proof things. Put a coupler on both ends and it will cause problems, especially for a train that only goes one way. I think they have discovered that even if only 1% of the users are impacted, it costs more to let the problem linger- e.g., the finger nail groove added to jumper plates. 12) it used to be no, they did not, but lego is now providing some measurements to the LDraw community I believe. I saw your "second problem" I didn't take the time to understand the particular programming language, but I suspect you have a nested loop, so in one iteration you are extending more than one link. I suspect you are populating half of your matrix on one pass and then the other half on the second (but I don't have proof). One thing that you could do to your code is to track the number of links it takes to reach a specific point. So instead of populating your matrix with "0", use "0" for first reachable, "1" for after one link, "2" for after two links, and so forth. You were not pricing track. A year ago you could get 6 straight segments of duplo track for $5 from S@H. Only with the most recent release did they push the duplo track up to the cost of the regular track.

Those stems are probably altbrick weeds. Yep!

The coaling tower is one of my favorites, a great subject for your insane attention to detail.

The numerous curves will cause some drag for trains (should be hardly noticeable with short, light trains, but very noticeable with longer heavier trains). At the top of the layout it looks like the two tracks are exactly 8 studs apart, center to center. Even if all of your trains are exactly 6 wide you may still have collisions as the trains pass through the curves in the outside track, swinging further into the inside track. You could probably use flex track in the approach on the inside track to increase the spacing between the two tracks though.

I believe the six wheels come from one mold with two blind and four flanged. You'll never see these in PAB. Lego customer service probably has them available for replacement parts, but not for purchase. Generally parts that come in a bag are produced by a third party, so they are more expensive to lego and they are less likely to offer them separately. You can find them on bricklink for relatively cheap, $1-$1.5 per wheel, and you can order the quantity you want. You can also get the original part from Big Ben's Bricks following the link in the last post (no relation: that Ben does wheels, this Ben does rods). Lego copied the idea of blind drivers and size of the wheels from BBB, who proved there was demand. Depends on the loco, there are plenty of engines built for tight radius curves that have blind drivers (e.g., many narrow gauge locos). For larger mainline locos they typically had all flanged wheels, but they also had much fancier suspension than can be realized in lego at this scale.

I think the references was to all of your switches. Particularly with long MOCs a curve into a switch without an intervening straight track can sometimes cause derailments, as well as two consecutive switches (e.g., your crossovers). However, it is the combination of the equipment, the track layout, they play in the track connections, the direction the train is running, etc. etc.. As long as you are not gluing it together, simply keeping an eye on the layout is probably all you need to do. If a train keeps derailing in a spot, you might have to add a straight track or always run that train the other direction. I don't see anything in your layout that is an obvious danger for all trains. One thought looking at your layout, you have the yard feeding to a CCW movement on the outside track. If you put 3 crossover pieces ("+") and put a switch on the left hand side of the inside loop (crossing the two main track and the lead track to the outside main in the bottom left of your layout), you could have the same yard feed to a CW movement on the inside track too. In that way, your trains pulling out of the yard would always be heading forward, no matter which direction they went around the layout.

Some nice work, the train cars look excellent. The only thing I'd recommend is to try to get a few thumbnail photos in the post itself.

You could so some sort of automated switching, like this, though building in manual switching would probably be more interesting to play with. Signals for the trains would be great (semaphores or lights), working gates and flashing lights at the grade crossings, working cranes to load/unload flat cars, draw bridges, two or more trains on one track (using block signal control?), other automated wayside elements (e.g., coal loading/unloading).

A nice build and please do continue to post more photos as it evolves.

This thread is a neat one, both to see the evolution of Lazarus's design and to see so many different takes at the same idea from other people. I also like the proportions on Andythenorth's car.

A big congrats JopieK! Keep the trains moving in all the right directions!

Great build!

Those look to be repaints of the container cars from the "getting started with Lego trains" book that roamingstudio found a photo of, and repeated below.

There are some neat features in your build. You will probably have to do some experimentation to figure out something that would work for the propulsion. I would think that a single XL motor powered truck would be able to pull your entire train (I've pulled 50+ cars with two XL motors off of one battery and IR receiver). The specific truck design you show looks a little delicate, but Cale, Nate, and Tony should all have examples of PF trucks in their photo stream.

A fantastic build of a classic locomotive, there are so many great details tucked into your MOC. Now you just need a string of passenger cars for her to pull (grin)

Like so many others have said, excellent build and the smoke deflectors are brilliant.

A great retro feel, like something from 1983.

I totally agree with the sentiment that once you have a feel for what you are doing, then you should go off and build the trains that are of interest to you. Still, most AFOLs probably never think to build anything beyond the set, and only a small fraction wander on to discussion boards like this. The lego train sets are the gateway drug for the AFOL train fan. The better these sets are, the more folks will be entering our hobby, and thus, the greater the demand for future train sets.

Looks like a great start, can't wait to see the rest of the layout.