zephyr1934

[full album on flickr] Today I come to the end of the build and present all of the cars. The 1937 Daylight consist was led by a baggage-coach combine. Followed by a standard coach Then three sets of articulated paired coaches (I built two sets, but am only showing one here). Like the original, each half is shorter than a normal coach. I tried many ideas for the articulation but nothing was perfect and ultimately I fell back to a similar design as I used on my Pioneer Zephyr. Here too I got lucky with the just in time introduction of new parts I needed. I believe it was both the orange 2x2 macaroni and 4x4 round plates had just appeared in sets as I was starting to design these cars. Operationally this car is one of the limiting factors on the train due to the articulation point and length of the cars. Although it can take R40 switches, it will not take R40 curves. I know it runs fine through R72 curves, but I think it can take R56 too (I have not tried yet). Next up is the coffee shop/tavern car: 1/2 counter service eatery, 1/2 bar. Who could ask for more? Given the large differences of the two sides of the car I am showing both in this picture. You can really spot the early days of streamlining in this car by the fact that it only has a service door on one side. This picture does not do full justice to the door, which like the vestibule doors is set in 1/2 plate. But the inset is much easier to do when you do not have to worry about the diaphragms. Remember when earlier I said this train has three domes on it? Well this car is the first dome in the train, rebuilt to a dome in 1955. The tavern car was followed by the dining car. Like the coffee shop/tavern car ahead of it, this car has two very different sides, and also only had a service door on one side... even more brilliantly, when the train was assembled, the access door for the diner was on the opposite side of the train then the access door from the tavern. Ah well, not my problem. This car is a good example where you can see the interior walls around the kitchen area. The next car in the 1937 consist was a parlor car. Outside it looks very similar to the coach, but inside it was only two seats across instead of the usual four. Remember that as a "Daylight" train, it did not need any sleeper accommodations. This car had the only state room (private compartment) on the train. I forgot where I read about it, but one of the sources said that the state room was not mentioned in public time tables until some time in the 1950's. It was used for movie stars and other VIP's who did not want to mingle with the other travelers in "first class". The furthest left window in this photograph is the men's toilt, while the next two windows show the walls of the state room. This car is the second dome in the train, rebuilt to a dome in 1955. And bringing the rear of train is the parlor-observation car. The interior was similar to the parlor car except the very end which had a lounge area. For the actual build, the snotted panels and windshields dictated the height of the orange stripe throughout the entire train. This car is the third dome in the train, rebuilt to a dome in 1954. The rear windows are held in with 6 wide plates spanning the width of the car, which doesn't look great when viewing the car at eye level, but they are not that bad when viewed from a more typical model train viewing angle. The rounded rear of the car has a TON of snot at different angles and a ton of 1/2 plate offsets. I do like the look of the panels a lot better than the brick + 2 plates used for the other windows, but structurally it just wasn't viable unless I wanted to build the cars with double walls. Below the roof of transverse mounted 1x3 curved slopes, the 1x2 profile bricks and headlight bricks for the letter-board do not offer much strength. Also, the studs up windows were better proportioned, if I had used snotted panels throughout, I would have had to have had a panel + 2 plates to get the right dimensions, which then loses the seamlessness of the panels. That's the entire train, I hope you enjoyed this extended tour of the San Joaquin Daylight. [full album on flickr]

That looks AMAZING, and takes an already top notch model up to 11. That hits all of the hard to reach corners of the very curvy prototype. Did you start out thinking you might use the glass for 1x2x3 windows but it turned out too small? Is that painted or were you able to print so close to lego colors (black is easier than the yellow windshield you show in another video)? I bet there are other folks who would love to get their hands on these (e.g., I'd like a pair in 6 wide dark green, grin). If you are not interested in selling them yourself, you might want to the folks at Brick Train Depot or similar to produce them. Regardless, it is always great to see your layout in action. Very well thought out and interesting operations. Much better than simple circles.

The 1937 Railway Age article linked in one of my previous posts includes a photo the original painted Daylight obsv tail sign, here's another photo of the tail sign. Meanwhile, according to Modeling the SP, the SJD had a neon tail sign from the start in 1941, while the Coast Daylight got them in 1939.

While I might use the occasional needle nose pliers when building or even a small mallet, you take your lego builds to extremes!

As mentioned in an earlier post, with so little information on the SJD cars, I decided to model the original 1937 consist. But the headend cars on the SJD are reported to be streamlined heavyweights (the one photo I saw looked more like a Harriman roof, but older stock nonetheless). So I suspect the full diaphragms were removed before the 1937 cars reached the SJD. In terms of the 1937 Daylight, I did take a few liberties. First of all, when new, the cars did have full diaphragms. That would be impossible to do at 6 wide using anything resembling pure lego. Also, from what I can tell, the tail sign on the observation car was a painted sign that was illuminated from behind (the red neon was added maybe 5 years later) but the red neon is just so "Daylight" that I had to go with it. As for the truck sides, like the SD truck sides used on the tender, I am using a pre-existing design. There is so much work that goes in to these custom parts that if I start tweaking them to be specific to a given piece of rollingstock all I will do is spend my time tweaking the the designs of the custom parts. They look better than the standard lego train wheels while still tucking discretely within a 6 wide profile.

Here's my last bit of special detailing on the cars, I like to make my models so they can close couple when on static display. I just use a spare magnet and pop it out for a parked display (top) or pop it in to run (bottom). This picture also is a good example as to why I need to get rid of the black gaskets. I'm hoping I still have time to redo those stickers before brickworld. The half plate offset is done with brackets. In the picture above, for the car on the right, there is a row of red plates below the windows and above the profile bricks. To the right of the door is a 1x1 plate and then what looks like a 1x2 plate. That supposed 1x2 plate is actually a 1x2 x 1x4 bracket. On the other side I believe I have a 1x4 tile, meanwhile what looks like a 1x2 red brick in the door, below the window, is really a 1x2 brick with studs on one side (the far side). And that brick is attached to the same tile that is on the bracket, thereby giving the 1/2 plate offset. Meanwhile, above that I have a normal 1x2x2 train window, which should be all one color. The red sticker (with the black gasket) is there to make the top bit of the window consistent with the corresponding "paint" on the adjacent walls.

The trick to being a good photographer is to take 100's of pictures and only show people the 2-3 good ones

Now that sounds like a real challenge, but would be could if you can make it work

If I'm going to give my wife a Lego Outback then I think I opened that door already. In my case, my wife owned a horse when we met, so there has never been a complaint about me throwing money into Lego (grin). You have to REALLY consume a lot of lego to rival the cost of a horse. (well, if you own a farm and do all the work yourself then a horse could be cheap, she didn't and we don't)

Today I present the vestibules on the cars. Probably the trickiest parts on the cars was the end doors on the vestibules. I believe the FRA considers the vestibule on the end of the car to be outside of the car, at least for safety standards (which I suspect is part of the reason why many railroads will not let you stand in the vestibules). Anyway, as was common on pre-Amtrak carriers, the end doors would lead to a platform that was separated from the interior of the car by a door (visible in the left frame below). The diaphragm side typically would have a retractable gate to close it off when the car was not coupled to another car, but there was no door to fully close the vestibule from the diaphragm (many model train cars ignore this fact since it would make the models a lot more complicated to manufacture and some modern cars actually do have a door on the diaphragm side, e.g., Amfleet cars). The vestibules are deceptively tricky on this build, like the real cars, I have a 2 stud platform between the car interior, the actual end of the car with the diaphragm, and the pair of exterior doors. The structure for the offset diaphragm conflicts with the structure for the half plate inset doors. It is also hard to photograph, taking me three shots to both show the interior two stud platform that makes up the vestibule + the diaphragm on the end + the inset doors on the side. Thank you thank you! Yes, I made the truck sides myself. As noted in the previous post, it took many iterations to get them to work to my satisfaction, they are good enough that I feel comfortable offering them for sale. Well... mostly to my satisfaction, they are still stupid expensive for me to make, so I do not anticipate they will be big sellers. Please do post your custom work (in a new thread of course). The train tech forum understands the limitations of the Lego parts palette for critical features and the lack of attention from Lego for our niche hobby. So if a custom part does something Lego does not, then it is usually well received in the forum. I think everyone here recognizes there is a spectrum of builders- from purists (with a few extremists who only build with parts manufactured prior to 1990) to fairly liberal builders who do not realize that glue is a four letter word. I think if you wander beyond pure Lego make sure your post is about something that augments Lego builds rather than something that is strictly (or mostly) non-Lego. Exactly that

If she hasn't left me yet, I felt safe knowing that a 6x18 MOC probably won't push her over the edge (grin)

The car shots have been taken. I will start with a couple of car features to highlight in individual posts and then I will show shots of the entire set of cars. Today, I want to focus on the truck sides. I used a modified version of this build for the trucks, using roller bearing wheels and custom truck sides. These sides were made out of necessity, I build 6 wide and it is really hard to hide the exposed wheels at this width. There is only about a plate worth of space to work with. So I sculpted these sides over MANY iterations. As you can see from the second image, the truck sides are almost flush with the 6 wide car. Although I did not build interiors, another feature to notice in the top image is that I built all of the bulkheads and walls in the cars. In this case you can see the restroom wall in the first window to the left of the door. In real life the restroom window would have been frosted so you wouldn't be able to see this wall, but getting the frosting right at this scale is tough. There is still one thing I need to update on the cars, I am redoing the dutch-door stickers to get rid of the black gasket around the window. It seemed like a good idea at the design stage but I don't like how the sides of the window frame are visible inside the gasket, that was an unforeseen function of the fact that the windows are 3D but the gasket is 2D.

The bogie plate is two plates tall, but the "bottom" of the top is only one plate below the top. That is to say, the bottom of the bogie plate or a 2x2 turntable placed under the train baseplate (6x28 chassis) will be even with the bottom of the chassis. The train baseplate has a one plate tall skirt around the edge that hides the bogie plate. If you use standard lego train wheels and instead of using a train baseplate you use normal plates for the bottom of your car, then there is no option but to build the car one plate higher. The train wheels have studs on the top that need the one plate clearance that the train baseplate provides, even if you do not use the bogie plate (both the 2x2 turntable and train bogie plate add a 1 plate height between the truck and the plate/train baseplate above). Using technic axles or roller bearing wheels you can make shorter trucks. This truck design is one plate shorter than you can get using normal lego train wheels (it attaches to a 4x4 round plate mounted on the bottom of the car, which is made out of normal plates). This truck design uses custom truck sides which can be replaced with a brick built truck side (or in rare cases, there are prototypes with internal truck frames). Using the placement in this design for cars with normal plates for the bottom, you can line up the car bottoms with other cars that use the train baseplate+bogie plates+normal train wheels. It also works best with roller bearing wheels. I would caution against using too many technic axle train wheels (the ones for the motors) since the technic axles have A LOT of friction. So a pure lego design would only be good for 1-2 cars. I personally like these 4x4 turntables for attaching trucks since they have more clutch than the 2x2 turntables, and much less rubbing area than bogie plates. But they do take up two plates rather than one. Note that there are newer turntables than you mentioned in your post that are only two plates tall using parts 61485 + 60474: + Anyway, that is a long answer for an eloquent solution. If you want an easy solution, as per the previous response, you can simply add one plate below the bogie plate on the trucks of the cars that use the train baseplate.

Here's a shot for today, Thank you for the kind words. I've requested two tables and am planning on a static display where the trains are the stars (i.e., not much else besides trains). It will have this, my recent Amtrak builds, Katy Caboose, and the steam elephant. Hopefully someone will let me run on their layout (grin).

Instructions probably never existed for that bridge, but it is a beauty. Watching that video led to another that has the same sequence in higher resolution (at around 9:00 I believe). You can see that the build included the the 1x16 light supports in yellow. It is amazing the stop motion animation Lego was doing back in the day.

Oh man, you are dehydrated. Choose the right liquid before your resume. That said, so far it looks pretty cool. I like how you integrated the turntable into the shelf, very clever. This is probably one of those builds that are best served with motion, please post video at some point.

@Toastie bring it on!

I still have not taken the individual car shots, so today, I share another shot of the entire train.

My wife has been dreaming of a dark green Subaru Outback for a few years now. This spring I surprised her and got her one. She was not amused. Of course, I can't see the point of building anything out of Lego unless it has something to do with trains. So naturally, I made it a hi-rail vehicle and powered it with a circuit cube. That did not raise her level of amusement much, it might have gotten a shrug out of her. You can't please everyone. But it's the thought that counts, right? Now on the technical side, because the train wheels and rubber tires are on almost the same plane bumps can lift the powered rubber tires off the rail, so it is not a great rail runner, but it does move (video proof). It does better when I add a plate above the rear train wheels so that it's a lot harder for uneven track to lift the powered front axle of the track. Not flawless, but good enough. In the name of full disclosure, to hide the train wheels so well, I did have to cut into the black 1x6 plates to make clearance. The train wheels snap off and it runs like a charm on the rubber tires (video example).

Today another video, this one a double cross.

Today we have movement! (The black widow in the the foreground isn't mine, I believe it was from the SRW Locomotive Works instructions though.) Yes indeed, fortunately for me this train seems to have a good weight balance and I only have problems if the lighter tender is in a curve. Not that I want to push my luck. Thank you F.Z. and exactly that. With all of the detail on the locomotive I wanted to show that first on its own. Then come back with the rest of the train. It is always amazing to me to see complete models of classic passenger trains at any scale. To think, what you see at the airport today back in the 1940's and 50's would have been a bunch of trains like this at a union depot. Most railroad museums will run short trains of mixed equipment, while it is great to see the equipment preserved, you do not usually see in in context. There are some tourist railroads and other entities that put continuity of paint scheme above preserving the original owner of a given car (4449, 261, Grand Canyon, CVSR)

The train is coming along very nicely, the cars look great!

Here's the complete train from the front end. It is neat to see how the design from the prototype goes from an orange swoosh on black to a hint of red, then all red around the orange that then continues to the end of the train. The engine seems pretty strong and the train is pretty heavy, but the train also has roller bearing wheel sets so that makes it a lot easier to pull. Although I have not tried with this train, I think it could also be pulled with a pair of PF train motors. The fact that I do not need to use supermagnets between cars suggests that this is far from the heaviest train that I've pulled with a pair of PF train motors. The fun part is when I hit the stop button on the PF train controller, the momentum in the train (and lack of friction in the wheels) pushes the engine a noticeable distance. I have a couple of videos coming soon Thank you, and it will be a LONG time before I attempt something on this scale this again. But I just had to put the Pacifics with those Vanderbilt tenders in proper context. @JayCal thank you for your kind words!

Good to hear the motor is working again. Another debugging technique is to power it from the 9v port on the top instead of using the tracks. That bypasses any potential contact problems with the wheels.

Today I present the entire 10 car train, viewed from the rear end. The train is 15 ft (4.6 m) long with the locomotive. The story of my build starts with the original Daylight, which began operation in 1937 running between Los Angeles and San Francisco along the California coast. The train departed in the morning and would arrive late afternoon, hence the name. The strong name would soon be used on other trains, at which point this original route would be called the Morning Daylight and then the Coast Daylight. But let's get back to 1937, the original consist was a matched set of 12 brand new cars: coach/bag coach 3x articulated paired coaches tavern car diner parlor parlor-observation These early lightweight cars were built by Pullman-Standard using normal steel with fluted stainless-steel sides painted in red and orange. They had full skirting covering the under-car equipment. The articulated paired coaches were a bit of an oddity, it was essentially two coaches that were permanently attached to one another across a shared central truck. The train was completely re-equipped at the end of 1939 and expanded to 14 cars. Most of the original train consist became the Noon Daylight that ran the same route. Then in 1941 the Noon Daylight was discontinued due to spikes in demand and shortages of equipment throughout the SP and all of the US during WWII. Most of the 1937 consist was reassigned to the Central Valley, becoming the San Joaquin Daylight (replacing the heavyweight San Joaquin Flyer on the same route). Though with the new approach to the San Francisco Bay, the SJD terminated at the Oakland Mole (ferry terminal) which is across the bay from San Francisco, The initial SJD consist was 10 cars: heavyweight bag/RPO heavyweight full bag 2x standard coaches 2x articulated paired coaches diner parlor-observation Unfortunately, finding good references for the SJD equipment is difficult. Reportedly at first the cars were lettered "San Joaquin" instead of "Daylight" but I did not find any photos of this usage. Since 80% of the cars came from the 1937 Daylight, and there are many great references on the 1937 Daylight (starting with 1937 Railway Age), I decided to do a hybrid: a 10 car set using the original Daylight consist, but leaving out one of the articulated coach pairs. This choice also gave me a greater variety of cars to model to make it all a little more interesting. As for the build, all of the cars are 6 wide. Each half of the articulated coaches are 44 studs long. The rest of the cars are 50 or 51 studs long (an extra stud when there is a vestibule). The tank on the tender helps make the transition from the 8 wide locomotive to the 6 wide cars. I'll go into details about the car builds in future posts. Actually, I carefully chose the car numbers so that my train has three dome cars on it... but those would only come in the future. After steam was discontinued and the consist refreshed with newer cars, the tavern, parlor, and observation in my consist were all rebuilt into dome cars. I was tempted to build one of the actual domes, but it would be completely non-prototypical for the train when pulled by the P-10's. 10 as per above (grin) Thank you. There are a ton of half plate offsets in the engine and the cars. On the cars the letterboards pop out by half a plate (tiles on top of headlight bricks) while the doors are set back half a plate. The easiest way to do that with the doors is to use an inward facing bracket on the wall of the car, connected with a plate or tile to a brick with studs on one side, also facing inward. Thus, pulling that brick 1/2 plate (the thickness of the bracket) inward. Put the window on top and tiles below the assembly and viola, a door inset by 1/2 plate. When possible, I also put blocking behind the door to ensure it does not accidentally get pushed in when handling the car. I had to use a different technique for the shorter doors, there, I used a brick with studs on the side pointed towards the outside of the car with a plate and a tile to get the inset. Then above, I used the bracket technique to sneak a snotted window above the door. Of course these tricks preclude building interiors to the cars. Which at 6 wide, it is already very difficult to do an interior well (there are some genius builders who have pulled it off though)