zephyr1934
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Everything posted by zephyr1934
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What a fantastic build, it looks amazing with lots of details. I can totally see what you mean about it being fragile, which comes from many of the details. Your experience with part availability is also spot on, you can't avoid it but with a bit of experience you learn to keep an eye on parts prices as you build (except when you don't and discover a common 2x2 plate is extremely rare in the color you're building) and when possible, come up with clever part substitutions to bring the costs down (e.g., a pair of 1x2 plates). I'm sure you will continue tweaking the build to keep the look while addressing whatever fragility. The tender coupling is brilliant, but I'd suggest you either glue the assembly together or replace it with a technic beam that cannot pull apart. Left on its own, it will wait until the least opportune moment to pull apart on you. Of course that means you have to find a half stud offset in the bricks, with the idea part substitution being a 1x2 brick with one stud on the side, but those only exist in white at the moment. With a little head scratching I bet a viable alternative could be found. At any rate, great work!
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That's enough about the locomotive for a while. I happened to have built a few cars to go with it too. I'll give you the background about the prototype cars next time, and then follow up with details of the actual MOCs after I take the "builder photos" and shots of the car details (I plan to take those photos in the next few days). The cars have fluted sides and were enabled with the return of red profile bricks that appeared at the end of 2019 on the 2020 LUGBULK parts list and would soon appear in the Manchester United Stadium for the bleachers. That reissue was fortuitous since they last appeared in sets in 2007 and pushed me to actually start the build.
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For today I have a shot "in the field" that circles around to the opposite corner, and look, unlike the LDraw images where I omitted the engineer's side it shows that in real bricks I actually did build that side of the engine. This picture also provides a better view of the tender and now you can actually tell the tool box is hanging off the rear of the tender. Meanwhile, thank you all for the kind words. Yes, that is the huge downside to PF, how much internal space it takes up. But it is so much nicer when the locomotive is the actual source of power. If I can't get it all into the engine though, I would probably prefer a powered tender than to put the battery in the tender and span the gap with a power line to the motors in the locomotive. Anyway, in this case the PF is a tight fit with the wiring and all. I had to use a 1x2x3 panel to span over the PF plug on the battery and as noted above, there are all of these crazy half plate offsets to work around. So it is pretty much I had just barely enough space to make it all work. If I were trying to conserve spacer I could maybe shorten the locomotive 2-4 studs behind the IR receiver. I suppose that is one of the nice things about the XL wheels (BBB XL with o-rings to be exact, I like the "ready to run out of the box" of them) is that it allows you to build bigger while keeping the proportions reasonable. (yeah, I know, not a revolutionary insight but it is true)
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Excellent work! Whether you build it yourself or not, I would encourage you to share the design for this, and for the 60337 (free or for sale). We need more MOD's like this for folks new to the hobby wanting something a little bit more than the City trains but who are not quite to the point of doing their own MOD's or MOC's.
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You know, I forgot to include a link to the full album, now added to the first post and repeated here: [album on flickr] Anyway, today I pull back the shrouding and show you what's under the hood. When I started building the P10 I assumed I would need to go with tender power, so I got the engine far enough that I knew I had the most challenging bit solved. I built a prototype in real bricks of the pilot truck (as per above), cylinders, a bit of skirting, and the drivers to make sure she would clear all of the curves. After I got that working I set the loco aside and spent WAY too long building up the PF tender (top left in the image below). The hard part was getting the top, sides and bottom to both line up and be securely attached. The one thing that is hard to see in this image is the crazy amount of half plate offsets I had to work in both vertically and horizontally on all three of the models. Anyway, after getting the PF tender far enough along I returned to building up the locomotive and I realized I might be able to fit the PF in there after all. The final result shown below. Note the discrete placement of the IR sensor right behind the stack. As a result, I scrapped the PF tender idea (and all of the time put into it) and went to a non-powered tender. Much better, and surprisingly, the three axle trucks on the tender do not cause any problems.
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Now that looks sharp!
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That's a great build, it really works in 8 wide. Lots of clever little details throughout.
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Looks like nobody is around. I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt anyone if we climb up into the cab for just a minute. Here we see two more views of the backhead. I was able to work in the brake stand and overhead throttle. These views also offer an opportunity to see how the orange stripe transitions. The stripe on the tender is 5 plates tall, but at the front of the engine it is 5.5 plates tall (3 plates + 1 snotted stud). At the cab it becomes all studs upright. To make up the half plate gap at the bottom I use 1x2 x 2x2 up brackets to fill it up. Along the way, the backhead is curved, with notches in just the right spot for the slope bricks that make up the roof. You can even see out the front cab windows. It might not be obvious in this picture but to get the throttle to curve away from the boiler it is attached to the same bar piece that was also used for the brake handles (32828). Thank you. I used the surviving and operational older sisters (2467 & 2472) as guides for the cab details. Obviously I couldn't replicate everything in the 6 stud width I had to work with, but I got a lot. The shape of the sextant is actually prototypical, as per the photo of 2472 below, but the Johnson bar is shoved forward here instead of straight up in my model. The brake stand is also evident in the photo directly below the engineer's hand on the throttle, but both brake handles are pointing towards the camera so they are not obvious in the photo
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That's looking really nice, great work!
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Looking again at 60197, I would say the MOD would benefit with a 6x28 baseplate instead of the 6x24. Increasing the front slope shortens it a little too much in my opinion.
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For today let’s sneak a peek into the cab. Peering in through the fireman’s window, we see the sight glass, brake stand, Johnson bar and poking down from the top of the window we see the throttle. Meanwhile, @LEGO Train 12 Volts, as a master train builder your praise means a ton.
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For today we circle back to the front of the locomotive for a better view of the nose. Gotta love that safe piece. You are too kind. That's the thing with these builds though, the prototypes were so beautiful that most of the credit goes to those real world designers. I'm just figuring out how to get the bricks to remotely mimic reality. I am totally certain that SP was aiming for the gold and just couldn't get there (grin). Thank your for you always kind words.
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Oh wow! That's a pair of amazing little engines. All the detail you've packed in is incredible. Wonder Twins! -
Getting back to touring the outside of my build, I'm not completely happy with any of my shots of the tender thus far. So instead of one I give you two shots. This first one highlights the oil bunker, You can see bits of the cab detail here, I'll come back to the cab in a later post. But while glancing at the cab, note the brown ingot used to represent the armrest in the cab window. Not a complicated feature but it seems to disappear in all of my photos and the crew appreciates it (grin). And this second image shows the complete tender Like the armrest, a few more features seem to disappear in my photos. In this case, the red running boards above the lettering (1x6 tiles) and the angled top to the toolbox on the rear of the tender below the lettering (1x1 double slopes) are hard to see at this angle.
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Great job capturing these (relatively) tiny but quite mighty locomotives. Is it a good runner?
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Great work! Though I fear that now you are going to need wider-radius curves (grin)
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Excellent work! Thanks for sharing
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Thank you for the kind words! I love the wide radius curves but I want to make sure my trains can handle R40 switches in yards because they are so much more space efficient (and so much cheaper). To top it all off, at the moment, my club only has R40 curves, but for the last several years any shows we did with operating trains I provided the track. At any rate I made sure to build R40 functionality in. Here's a figure showing the truck action on an R40 curve, with and without the track. You can see the 3 long technic connector bending to the top as the coral colored truck twists to follow the track. The connector pulls the truck just a little forward, allowing it to clear the driver wheels behind, and as luck would have it, tuck in just behind the cylinders. The two vertical pivot points are also apparent in this picture with a second black technic connector that is still inline with the body of the locomotive and the light gray connector on the truck itself. You can also see in this image that in the digital model I only built one side of the locomotive. You have to be careful about looking too closely at models or you might get something like this (grin) There are actually several anachronisms in that model you linked to, here's another view The smokebox should have been painted black when the engines wore daylight colors (but later changed to graphite when the engines were painted black). The tender should have been lettered "Southern Pacific Lines" (standard practice until 1946) and the P-10's were painted black by 1947. These engines did not pull those tenders until after being painted black, e.g., look at the rear of the oil bunker and catwalks behind the bunker on 2484 in 1941 and 1947 on this site. On the same site, if you look closely, the fireman's side running board bump from the shroud over the air compressors should have only been about half the height of the red stripe but it is the full height in the model above. Can you tell that I've looked at just about every online picture of these locomotives and their models (grin some more). Back in the 1990's I volunteered on the 2467 and 2472 (as a lowly grunt, but a happy grunt) so the SP P class has a special place in my heart. You are right though, the shroud over the air compressor is probably the most prominent feature that indicates the skirting was a retrofit rather than in the original design of these engines. But it was ultimately a feature I chose to edit out in my model. I could have easily captured it with red tiles above the running boards, but then the red/orange transition when viewed from above would have highlighted another problem, the running boards should be black on top. The prototypes are rarely seen from above so if I had used electrical tape (or similar) to cover the top of the running boards, although prototypical, it would look strange when viewed from conventional model railroading angles. This is one of those cases where doing it right would have made it look wrong.
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The locomotive is 8 wide at the skirts and rods, I did not want the rod extending beyond the skirting and for that reason I decided not to build valve gear. It is a streamlined locomotive and should look the part. Unfortunately I had to go 9 wide at the cylinders, but I don't think it is too obtrusive. The reason for this is, as I mentioned in my last post, the locomotive is designed to take R40 curves. The front truck actually has 4 degrees of freedom, with the first a rotation parallel with the track so that the pilot can stay on even over bumps, the second is a left/right rotation behind the center of the truck, so that as the truck takes a curve the lever arm will push the truck forward (I think it was builder Jayhurst who demonstrated the technique here many years ago) and at the end of the lever arm is another left/right rotation so that the truck will turn to follow the track. The final rotation point is another one in line with the tracks so that the truck stays parallel with the ground. You can see the net result here, and in detail here: The front axle ducks outside the skirting just in front of the cylinders while the rear axle tucks in behind the cylinder, and for this clearance, the cylinders had to stick out an extra 1/2 stud on both sides. It is a tight squeeze, but it all works. The whole interaction with the cylinder and wheels was among the first things I worked out to make sure the engine would run smoothly. My description of how it all comes together might be a bit squishy, so I could try to do an exploded assembly of the truck in LDraw.
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I like the fact that (if I'm not mistaken) you've keep the cars from the set largely unchanged and it still works amazingly well. I would encourage you to make your design available (for free or for pay) once the set is released as you have improved greatly upon it. I was going to say that I didn't think LDraw had the battery motors... ... but assuming that is a LDraw model shows what I know
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Thank you, and this is only just the start (grin) Thank you too and apologies in advance for being a butt, but I am going to drag the presentation out a bit because it will be a very long time before I build anything else this ambitious and because I still want some "new-ness" when she debuts for real at Brickworld next month. With the promise of adding a more complete photo I was going to ask if anyone knew what was odd about this locomotive and completely figured that once I posed the question that @Hod Carrier would chime in 15 min later with the correct answer. But you beat me (and him) to it. Either you caught the engine number, the small hint that there are only 6 drivers, or you were already familiar with the train, regardless, here's the payoff, [in the second photo notice the firemen talking on the tender while the water overflows the tank] I'll write more about the history in a few days, but the quick version is that with the great success of the original 1937 Daylight service (between LA and San Francisco along the California coast) demand quickly grew. In 1941 they added the San Joaquin Daylight up the Central Valley, now serving Oakland instead of San Francisco, which sits across "the Bay". This new train was equipped with the coaches from the original 1937 Daylight after it got new cars but had completely new (as in old) power. Because it was the middle of WWII, there were none of the GS Northerns available. So three P-10 Pacifics from 1923 were skirted up with skyline casings to look like the GS class locomotives (minus a few wheels) to pull the train. SP streamlined a few more Pacifics for the Sunbeam, but they were on the T&NO subsidiary and had a different look. This practice of dressing up older locomotives to look like the shiny new streamliners was not unique to the SP. Just off the top of my head, Milwaukee Road made a few baby Hiawatha's and NW streamlined several existing Class K 4-8-2 locomotives to look like the J's. As for the build, let me start at the beginning. I have been collecting bricks for this build for 2.5 years. I was aiming to bring the train to Brickworld in 2020. That didn't happen. Over the intervening years I went through over 50 digital versions and several physical mockups to make sure all the mechanicals work. Perhaps the biggest feat is the fact that this engine will take R40 curves (though I can't help it from looking silly when it does). More pictures coming soon.
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Remember, the EB storage is only for your avitar and very small graphics. If you want to share photos you need to use something like flickr or brickshelf to host the images.
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I will be taking the Daylight to Brickworld... [to be continued] [album on flickr]
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I can totally see the Japanese influence in the base set, but I like the updates in JayCal's MOD (MOC?). If the windows do belong at the rear to be prototypical, you could put the battery and motor at the front.
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Oh man, Friends is blowing City out of the water. There's some great things going on in Friends.