zephyr1934

A long time ago Andy from OKBrickworks had a 1x2x? holder for ball bearings on Shapeways. When I asked him about it at brickworld this year, I think he said it was not great. It would be great if someone came up with a good solution...

Good job capturing the 12v spirit with this MOC of a somewhat unusual prototype.

I didn't say the independent plastic wheels are superior in general, just the limited target scenario of a single kid with a single city set for the short period of time that the parents are still paying attention to the new purchase/gift. What I'd love to see is roller bearings for technic axles.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, MOCing comes up with for these wheels. The the piston stroke is 5 studs instead of the usual 3

Easy to do (grin)

Ah, the decedents of RailBricks Reverse Engineering Challenge #9 (p37 in RB 12). Which took heavy inspiration from many places, including this and that. I wonder what you could do with the spear-switch idea that was unique to 9v track where the spear poked through the holes in the rails used to crimp the metal on. Spear switch idea 1 ca 2002 Spear switch idea 2 ca 2008 Plastic track under-rail variant ca 2010 All of which were inspiration to "fixing the double crossover" in Railbricks 9 (ca 2011), see the pull cord in the bottom of p30.

I would say hold on to those melted motor frames and at some point use the black one for practice. I bet you could take a page from real steam engine repair- cut out the bad material and weld in a patch. Or in this case, cut out the bad plastic and make a 3D printed replacement jig to do the job if holding the motor with the bonus of potentially allowing you to use a slightly different sized motor too. Of course none of this is trivial and I wouldn't suggest attempting until much later, but it potentially offers a path to reviving the rarer red motors.

The interesting bit is that the plastic axles on R40 reduce the time by almost half compared to metal (and that is with much about 1/3 of the track being straight) whereas the metal only save maybe 10% on straight compared to plastic. I'm sure exact results would change as you make the cars heavier but the general trend probably doesn't change. So for the target customers (kids on R40 loops that have more curves than straights) the split plastic axles really do improve things. Definitely impressive for 9v, but only if you limit the number of motors and transformers. As soon as you allow for "distributed power units" it simply becomes an unlimited number of short trains coupled together (doable with 9v but difficult, easily done with PF and PUP). With power only at the front you are likely to stringline the curves (e.g., at 1:34 in the video). It looks like the "record train" in the video had about 4 9v train motors at the front, but it is still impressive given the forces they overcame. Make the cars heavy enough to prevent stringlining and the magnetic couplers will pull apart, strengthen the coupling and you go back to strignlining. You could counter this with negative banking on the curves. It quickly turns into a very complicated optimization problem.

This picture reminds me of a few hours I spent watching trains in Carlisle on the NW coast of England maybe 5 years ago. At the time they were getting at least one steam engine per weekend coming up the secondary west coast line. It's a blur of two trains that past, a local train with a Class 37 on the point, and a nuclear waste train that had one or two cars on it that looked very much like set 4591 that you are pulling here. I had no idea what the waste train was until all of the local transpotters went to the other side of the station as it passed through and I asked what was up. But getting back on topic for everyone else, the build looks great, I like how you are bringing in modern accents (curved slopes, masonry brick wall) while keeping the spirit of the 80's town sets alive

What if half of the pair existed but the other half is new, e.g., building the "in service" counterpart to this existing MOC: Or going the other way, having the in-service car from a few years ago and building the cabin for the contest?

Very interesting to see. I thought I had seen similar tests but looking back, they were probably roller bearing vs normal wheels. Wiggle track would be interesting, but also doing an "S" pattern with 90° turn into 180° counter-turn into 90° counter turn all on R40 track. This would show if the independent wheels provide significant benefits on tight curves, and possibly if there is enough inertia to get across the lateral portion. Might be hard to keep the track steady though.

Mark, it's been a while, good to see you around these parts. Nice review, but I have one little quibble, If the set fails, the natural corporate conclusion will simply be proof that there are not enough lego train fans to justify any AFOL sets. (grin & sigh)

Oh, that is one thing Michael mentioned, the power supply can be set to max at 9v or 12v

Great questions and I have no idea, they did not get in to that level of detail at the presentation. Definitely something to ask of FX when they get closer to releasing the motor.

Amazing work!

At the Brickworld show and tell Michael said that one option for the 9v motor was to use it as a power pickup to feed the PFx brick through one of the ports on the top of the motor, which would then control the 9v motor by feeding back to the other port on the motor. I believe Michael also said that the "super 9v motor" would have an integrated PFx brick. So the PFx brick probably isn't dead, but it might be ignored for a while.

That printed cypress tree might be cheaper than the real thing right now (grin)

I was just curious if you had a photograph of the actual implementation, but no problem. Meanwhile, the display looks good... but at this size the info panel winds up covering 1/3 of the model. Which has a certain humor unto itself.

This trackwork looks great. Maybe 15 years ago someone else came up with a similar switch design. The photos are no longer available, but there's still a detailed video here.

such a crazy prototype, the model is well executed

Photos or it never really happened (grin). Seriously though, it would be interesting to see what you did and how.

Nice!

Nice curves!

Looking good! Just two suggestions, first and foremost, don't hide the images behind hidden contents, show them off where anyone clicking on the thread can see them. Second, most (but not all) of the engines of this type in the US were coal burners, so they would typically have a coal bunker that was visible from the top but hidden as much as possible from someone on the ground or a station platform. In either case the coal would be at the front of the tender. All of these changes would be minor to your fantastic builds (and you can still say these are the oil burners of their generation, grin)

That's what everyone was hoping for (sad clown). Even worse, unless you want the minifigs or those huge wheels, it isn't even a good parts pack. The one thing I do like about it are the photos of the car when it is only a flatcar. That wide base really looks nice.