zephyr1934

Oh no, I see that clearly a lot of time and experimentation went in, there are too many novel tricks there

To my eye it still looks mostly like the Alco, but regardless, nice work

Whoaa, I missed that first time around, brilliant indeed

That is a very complicated build, great work with lots of clever tricks. Thanks for sharing all of the behind the scenes trickery to get the complicated details.

Looking good, excellent use of 87058 and a big improvement on the well car design in the Maersk set.

Wow! What is that, like 28 studs wide? That is an insane build, but it is incredible.

Brilliant!

Fantastic job! Perhaps trans clear boat studs for headlights?

The key thing in either case is to only put traction bands on the powered axles. In which case you could do either. My hunch is that it would be best to have one powered axle for a small locomotive on R40 curves (to reduce the resistance due to the large relative difference in the radii of the two rails). For larger locomotives or heavier trains you might need more powered axles, but you can tell if that is the case if you find your wheels slipping, in which case having additional wheels with traction bands (connected by hidden gears) would increase your friction with the rails. On the other hand, if the motor is struggling to move the train you probably need more motors or fewer cars. Meanwhile, the larger the radius curve you have, the smaller the relative difference between the radii of the two rails, and thus, less resistance from the wheels on opposite sides of the locomotive fighting each other, thereby reducing any negative impacts of having multiple powered axles on the curves. Ultimately though, if you are happy with how a locomotive performs that is all you need, i.e., no point in redesigning an existing engine unless it has problems running. Whereas for a new build, it can be fun exploring new techniques.

Nice work, though that tender in the last photo kinda dwarfs the locomotive. Enough coal to run for 48 hr straight I suppose (grin). What about doing away with the motor side, redoing the "cylinders" using a "1x2 x 1x2 up" bracket (kind of like this image, only without the crazy half stud offsets), and the right length of bar that also happens to hold the third wheel on. Or if it needs to be stronger than a bar, make a technic assembly in red to do the same thing.

A couple of thoughts, make a dummy car to replace the tender so that you can slowly push the engine through a switch and watch where things bind up. If you can't reproduce it moving slowly then you know speed is also a factor The problem could be the wheelbase between the flanged drivers or it could be the pilot or trailing truck reaching the limit of its swing. If the wheelbase is binding, you MIGHT be able to make it work B-F-F but that also runs the risk of looking odd and not fitting your current clearance At some point lego changed the design of the guard rails on the plastic switches, if you have a mix of old and new switches you could check to see if you have two different types, it might work on one but not the other One of my steam engines does not like the standard switches, but I found that it would run through them just fine if I added a couple of extra "guard rails" in the form of a 2x2 round tile on top of a 2x2 round plate on top of one of the unballasted ties. With the new 1/4 round tiles or triangle 2x2 tiles you can now make longer guard rails too.

I too am a purist from an operational standpoint, if a model will run on R40 it will run anywhere. It is nice to be able to use normal switches and/or the tight R40 curves in a layout if you need them to save space, even if they are not on the main line. It is also a fun challenge to superimpose on top of what might already be a difficult build. Still, one does need to make exceptions for some trains. You could honor the purist in you by declaring that a particular build is specifically for static display on straight track, but gosh, look at my surprise when it handles R88 curves (grin). Your UP turbine is off to a good start

That is insane! Like the prototype, the build is wandering into areas one would never think possible (but the build was far more successful than the prototype in achieving its goals). Neat project, while it certainly needs wide radius curves to look at home I like the fact that you made sure it could handle R40.

Yeah, probably, but I would think you just need a small lift (half a plate?) so that it might become hard to see. Another possibility would be to make the middle frame only 2 wide to allow the center axle to slide but that would destroy the illusion of a 12v motor block No, horrible idea, never do it! But PM the phone number of the shop to me (grin). Seriously though, that is a great deal if most of the parts are there.

Great idea (and a potential solution to letting the public run trains at a show without letting them go too fast, or reverse, or whatever you don't want them to do) BTW, is that a centipede in the most recent videos?

Excellent reply, thank you for the field study and all of the info.

There is a motor stop block and a motor float block In theory you would want the second since the motor would coast to a stop, but it probably does not coast enough for what you are looking for. You can code up a slow start/stop by progressively stepping up/down the motor speed though. So far I have only used plates and found red to be reliable and green also appears to be. I haven't tried all the colors but yellow, gray, black and white all gave poor performance for me. Though the fact that some physical colors are detected by multiple "sensor colors" could work to be an advantage, effectively providing a logical "AND" or "OR" for the layout. Might be difficult, a plate is 3.2 mm tall and the sensor is probably less than 10 mm from the top of the rail to begin with, so it might work, but it might not. As for relying on successive sensors, as it is, I needed 8-10 studs of red plate to get a reliable color read from a passing train at half power, so you would need another 6+ studs of "high" tiles to allow for the second sensor read.

I say having it as a default mode is horrible because there are good reasons why Lego chose the current mode where everything shuts down. The primary target are kids who have a single PF set (be it a train or Batmobile or what not). You do not want the parent who just bought the set for xmas to then freak out when the Batmobile takes off down the stairs or down the street because it lost connection. So in that sense I think if you are only going to have one mode the current mode makes sense for the larger customer market. But in the programming mode it would be REALLY nice to have an option to turn that behavior off, even if you have to do it every time you want it. (again, I'm not sure if power efficient reacquisition is feasible though). Also keep in mind that most kids only have 0-8 segments of straight track. Your large layout is comparable to a show even if it is just your own house. Hey, @Jetro do you know the author of that article? (grin) If you haven't done so already, would it be possible to test two remotes connected to one hub and see what happens if one of the remotes moves out of range? In particular, How long does the out of range remote stay connected? Does the hub continue running after the out of range remote goes out of range? Does the out of range remote power down? When you bring the out of range remote back in range (and if necessary you power it back up) does it automatically reconnect? If not, does it still connect when you press the green button or did it forget the network? I only have one remote at the moment but if that does work I would likely buy another one to test in action at a real show (with all the additional bluetooth interference). It is a clunky solution but at least it is a possible solution.

Can't wait for the trixbrix library, in the mean time your automated layout is very impressive and some of your sample layouts are crazy in a good way, with many nice tutorials of what is feasible.

It would be a horrible default mode but a VERY useful optional mode for things like shows. The PFx brick does offer this functionality for bluetooth in PF, but it is still clunky since you have to actively reconnect. I suspect the reconnection hassle is a function of bluetooth rather than the PFx brick unless you want to waste a lot of energy (literally) for the PUP box to continually search for the transmitter (which I bet Lego would do if the ever added this feature, eliminating the benefits of running without tether)

Well played! What about raising the tan 1x2 technic brick with one hole up by a single plate to reduce (eliminate?) the friction on curves?

That is insanely cool! Hopefully (1) it will have the ability so that you can program your code to listen to either the controller or the smart phone app so that when it is in range you can issue commands [corollary 1a, that the PUP device is smart enough to reconnect BT to the controller] and (2) that you could reverse the process and reinstall the current lego firmware at some future date. With #1 PUP becomes a functional replacement for PF as long as you do not need more than two motors/outputs. With #2 you have the flexibility to go back if you ever wanted to.

Are you using the old blue track? The rails and sleepers are fairly loose, you would probably be better with the modern one piece track. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by elevated, do you mean a few bricks off the ground? If so, it might not look pretty but in three bricks you could make a simple east-west continuous offset with technic bricks and axles, then the next layer a north south continuous offset, and finally a turntable to match the angle of the track above. Another thing you could do for the curves is simply make a stack 4 tall of curve track and connect the different layers together on each sleeper. That will be pretty rigid and strong, a good bridge. (I forget the fellow who made a few such structures on this forum, but it seems to be pretty robust)

Very nice little yard. At that size it wouldn't be too hard to set up remote control too. I also like your system for generating the consist, very clever. You could easily do similar to select destinations, lots of great possibilities. Are you too far away from the power drop? Maybe experiment with a temporary power drop close to the switching yard. If it works you have a solution if it doesn't at least you know it is not due to power drop from all the 9v joints

It's a massive beauty, and the anchor of the display. Great work!