zephyr1934

Nice progress! And I'm jealous, even with your six month break you are moving faster than me on my steam project.

That is a great layout! I vote for keeping it out and find somewhere else to put the living room furniture.

Why not submit them as brothers there, the same way as you have presented them here?

Nice!

Thank you A, M + P for all of the kind words! I'll post a reveal of how the roof goes together, and I will aim for right before the submission deadline. The two hard bits are making sure the outer tiles are not completely pressed in and also being careful not to flip her upside down. The roof tiles have a little friction holding them in but they can fall out. As for reverse engineering her, do not underestimate the rest of the build, there's a lot of craziness going on inside, but if you don't try to do the little smile it becomes a lot simpler. We have wheels, the Katy has landed! And she has taken several spins around my layout. I was a little worried that the steps would interfere with the trucks, but no problems even on R40 curves. Of course with such a short wheelbase the trucks hardly pivot at all. She's 16 studs long and fits nicely on a single track segment. Almost there, just need some eyes.

Cool! Meanwhile, I didn't see anything on the FX pages about that controller but the store page lists the switches "coming in 2021"

Because of the stack location I've always assumed that was the rear, but you're right, it is ambiguous. I'm learning a lot from your project. If that is the front, it adds a whole new dimension, I can see the headline, "engine driver runs himself over as he tries to feed the fire." An amazing little MOC, it is like those cool chairs made out of three parts and a wand sprew that are so spot on and leave you wondering, "how'd s/he ever come up with that?"

I'm not a motor expert, but it could be that your motor is burning out. It could also be that the drive mechanism (and other trucks on the engine if using technic axle wheels) are just building up more friction. Even if the motor turns out to be fine right now, eventually it will wear out so you might want buy a couple of L motors or make sure you can upgrade to a PUP L motor (via some adapter or splicing the right wires) when the day comes. If PF L are more expensive than PUP L at this point, I'd just start planning for the PUP path.

You are too kind, but I too am amazed at how well it is turning out. That magnet is purely decorative. Katy has a coupler right in that spot in the illustrations and so keeping it Lego, I put a magnet coupler there too. The 2x4 tiles will get window/eyes to complement the 1/2 plate mouth at the bottom of the door. The other end is strictly business and has an actual coupler attached to the truck. Meanwhile, the chicken coop is complete (but not the entire build, trucks are next, then I'll worry about stickers). The roof is a little fidgity to get right, I've smoothed it out since taking this shot. You can see the bottom of the hinges that hold the outer tiles in place in the center of the body. It turns out that the tiles need to be 1 mm from "completely pressed in."

The family looks good together. And the Fiat looks fascinating

That is a deceivingly challenging little prototype you chose. You are doing an amazing job capturing all of the minute curves and details.

If you haven't looked at The Caboose Who Got Loose since you were a kid, reading it as an adult you will see so many great details in the trains that you missed as a youth. The couple of pictures of the locomotive are really nice (if you have more money than time it looks like the book is going for $10 new and $5 used) Meanwhile, thanks all for the words of encouragement. Last night I put the roof together for the first time and it kind of fell in. I had to move the supports between the test build and the actual model, turns out that was a mistake. But I've already figured out how to rework it, so hopefully it will be a quick fix.

Fine, I take it all back then... no, just kidding. Doesn't matter how long you've been doing it, it's good work. For me at least it seems that brute force and banging on it until you find the pieces that fit is the key to so many good builds. Meanwhile, I would encourage you to set up a flickr account or similar to share your train builds in a centralized fashion. Regardless, looking forward to seeing more of your builds.

That is an amazingly complex build. And your head doesn't hurt after you come up with something like that? The way you sneak the cheese brick in for the front window (in the other picture) is just icing on the cake. Was there any reason why you went with a 1x2 tile (green, far left) instead of one of the angled tiles for the corner of the roof?

Katy's cabin is complete and without her trucks she looks like she's been converted into a chicken coop. The copula is next, then the roof, then the trucks. I might have the only OcTRAINber entry that is intentionally smiling (grin). Here's her happy side, and her not so happy side, While it is visible in the previous two shots, here's another view of the groves in action to accentuate the "plates as paneling" effect. It actually has an unanticipated benefit of masking the four spots where the groves from tiles were unavoidable by blending them in.

The tracks do have the notches in the side, definitely for crimping metal, couldn't be anything but 9v!

Indeed, as a mostly 6 wide builder I must say that it is still a fine scale for MOCing in as long as you do not mind giving up any real interior. I like the brick savings ($, weight, length, etc). Nothing wrong with 8 (or 10, 12, 16 wide building) I do drool at the detail.

That's brilliant!

That looks really good! It looks like a real locomotive rather than stylized Thomas, but I assume that is what you are going for. Some nice use of bricks for steam and smoke details too. That looks to be standard L gauge, no? The track colors threw me off for a second. If you keep building like that nobody will believe that you are new to Eurobricks (grin).

My bricklink orders have now all arrived (I was worried about seller #3 but they finally shipped). Most of Katy is studs towards the rear, i.e., her face will be studs up. So that means studs away from her aft end, or in conventional building, her aft is her bottom. The aft is designed to be functional, and it will eventually have a normal coupler attached to the leading truck that has to swing left/right below the deck of the caboose. So I kept the anti-studs on the bottom-most brick exposed, a 1x4 plate in this case. Here is the first part that I built, the rear deck with the stairs. I got this far in my build session, about 1/3 of Katy's cabin is complete at this point. Those inverted tiles really throw me off, my brain sees flat and thinks the studs should be facing that way.

What's this you say???

Nice progress

Great idea, extending it further, 3mm rigid hose and bananas also come to mind (whoops, I see that already came up after the cited comment, so make this +1)

Looking good! Are you sure? That's an honest question, I ask because I've had a pair of XL motors and a normal IR receiver works just fine with really heavy trains, but I've never tried a pair of L motors. Regardless, it would not be limited to V2, I know SBrick will deliver 3A, and PFBrick might do similar.

That's a pretty long and heavy train and with your numbers it sounds like you are building about 72 stud long cars. No matter what you are building at this length it will probably take some trial and error to get it to work and you will need a massive layout to even fit it, much less not have the train take up most of the loop of track. I assume you already know all of that. Have you built a train even 1/3 this length? There are all sorts of problems you run into with long trains- drag from being in a curve (or worse, multiple curves), drag from uneven track, etc.. Your couplers are likely to become your weak point. Or if you use something stronger than magnets (e.g., BMR Kadee couplers) their attachment points. The train might be heavy enough that it could stringline on a curve if all of the power is at the head end. All of these challenges can be surmounted, but it will take trial and error, with some of the failed trials potentially being expensive and time consuming. Still could be fun to undertake and even more satisfying once you get it mastered. A couple of thoughts, 1) a good "if all else fails" backup plan might be to be prepared to make 1 or even 2 cars be a hidden locomotive, so maybe there is no interior or you only show a portion of the interior on those cars. Using the covered space to hide the motors and batteries. Your audience probably won't notice that they can only see the interior of 24 out of 26 cars. 2) Personally I would try to power all of the units the same way as the lead unit to mechanically avoid having to compensate. Even if you use rotation sensors, wheel slip could throw your coordination off. But I would think through trial and error you could come up with sufficiently matched gearings. I just wonder what happens when you have part of the train in a curve and part on a straight, distributed power could cause problems by compressing the slack or increasing the drag. 3) Build about 1/3 of the train as if that were all you were going to build. So make cure you get all of the critical cars necessary to capture the essence of the full train. Then use that as your test base to see what you can do for the rest of the train. Presumably if you have the track and experience to build a 50' train, you probably have enough cars around to simulate the remaining 2/3's of the envisioned train. This will let you experiment to see how the full train will perform and then after experimenting a bit, you can calibrate what want to do from here. Having built the key cars, you have covered yourself in the event that you need to cut something back. Whatever it is, I bet it will look amazing