zephyr1934

Oh yes, you always want non-friction pins for the rods (except for the cases where you KNOW you want friction). Parts will usually be cheaper from Bricklink than from Lego, but not always. The biggest advantage of putting the motor in the tender is that you have a lot more room to hide the PF stuff. Since you are using PUP, you still have the battery box to hide. If your loco is small you might not have room in the loco. Second advantage is that with the normal motor wheels the train will go slower than if you powered the large driver wheels. Of course if you are building for an IDEA, you probably do not need a motor [(1) even great trains don't win that lottery, (2) if Lego did make a set of that train it would probably be unpowered- see toy story, lone ranger, HP, xmas, etc, (3) the accepted IDEA designs usually get a major overhaul before becoming sets]. In terms of the constitution, you are first building virtually? If so, follow the posted instructions first for the bits you need. It might very well be that my design is not compatible with using the train motor for the main driving wheels.

Not a bother, I would not have written in the first place if it were. The whole point is to have fun.

Probably the cheapest way to get lego train parts (including complete cars) are from the sets. There are many people who sell instructions to build cars, and many others that sell completed cars (custom designs or parted out from sets). A google search will turn them up, a lot of them hang out on ebay. Some look great, some not so much. Bricklink is the most comprehensive spot to buy lego parts/sets/etc. Depending where you live, there might be a 3rd party store front in your town that sells lego parts. Unfortunately straight track will never be cheap, but you could fake it with flex track if you don't mind the look and the rumble. There are some clone brands that make track of the same gauge. Not sure how good or how expensive (I think it might be significantly cheaper, but in brown or black). If you are handy, you can even make your own track.

But seriously though, have fun. A great way is to start tweaking the original set to add something that you want it to have. Slowly get more and more complicated. You might also want to pick up some basic train parts (wheels and couplers) from Bricklink so that you can add your own designs without tearing apart the original set. When making bogie cars, you can save money and use a turn table. If your kids are in to HP, the HP train is also compatible with the lego track, but it is a push train (can be motorized, but if you go that route, it is probably cheaper to buy a copy of the passenger train for parts than to get the individual PUP components, and that would also give you extra "basic train parts"

The EN design of pushing an axle through a hole is a lot of resistance. It is not a problem on the EN because of the XL motor, but it might be an issue in your build. The pin between two bars (as per the two designs linked in my earlier post) is far more energy efficient. As for spacing, slack, etc., it all depends on the design. You really have to build up the mechanicals and tweak them until you get something you like. Be sure to test for clearance and functionality on curves, not just straight track. If you want your design to be really robust, add a bump to your test track (a plate under a rail joint)

The end of your train cars will swing out on the outside of the curves, while the middle of the cars will pull to the inside of the curve. Any platform will need to accommodate this clearance issue. Find your most extreme cars and use those for your baseline, then build your station back from there. I'm sure there are some clever ways of building a large curved platform (e.g., snotted slopes) but simply using wedge plates is probably sufficient

You certainly can bypass using the train base plate, and just use normal plates. The pin for the bogie plate will fit a hole in a technic plate, just be sure to leave two plates of space above the hole. The main benefits of the train base is that it is strong (for pulling through), is stable from the start (most alternatives require some additional structure), and it is simple. The limited colors is certainly one big minus, if you are bypassing the train baseplate, you might want to also change colors and have your baseplate match the rest of the car. Another problem is that the bogie plates are getting expensive, especially in black. When you use the train baseplate the bogie plate is pretty much completely hidden because the train base is two plates high (unless it is a flatcar where you might see the pin), so it doesn't matter if it is yellow (apparently the new lego standard), but if you use standard plates to build up the bottom of the car, you will see the bogie plate from the side. The bogie plates in black are now several bucks. So you might want to consider turntables instead. The simple 2x2 is good for most applications, as is the 4x4.

I had two brand new buildings on display (now I'm up to three buildings, with the third being the grain elevator in the background of several of the shots... four if you count a 14 yo switch tower). The first building is a warehouse. I've been wanting to build something in this style for some time (concrete floors and beams, with brick and window walls) and incorporate a siding to give my trains somewhere to serve. This MOC is not based on any particular building. There are lots of juicy details on this unassuming little building, including the hard to photograph fire escape and the main entrance (man, the snot you can do in a building compared to a train) Since this was meant to be a neglected siding, I came up with a couple of clever tricks to do with ballasting the warehouse siding, including a tie that slipped out of position and a more typical end of track. I was also experimenting with tricks so that when you ballast with 1x ties, techniques that would allow one segment to have tiles on studs 1 and 32, or on 2 and 31. Some worked, like the askew tie, others not as nice, like the three closely spaced ties that you might be able to see in some of the pictures. Since this building might be raised to be in line with the street (as it was at BW) or not, I chose a cantilevered loading dock and the track were separate. Although not shown, I also came up with a quick and dirty trick to raise the building up to match the roads- use straight track (for which I have a ton) instead of some brick built structure. Whereas the second new building is 1920's or 30's era shop/apartment building that is a few miles from where I live. This one was a challenge to get the windows right. If I just built it normal, the panes of glass would disappear into the blackness of the unlit interior (same for the doors, which I changed to white so that you could see them). The windows are actually offset by half a stud in both directions, the window frames are snug against the windows, with a half plate gap between them and the walls. It was an insane prospect to get those all to fit. Then the windows themselves are 1x2 trans clear with a white background to keep the details of the windows visible. As with all of my MOCs in this thread, questions and comments are welcome.

You're insane (I say with utmost respect)

A masterpiece! So many details, so much creative part utilization, astonishing!

All of those cars are fantastic. The coal wagon has some great action and the tank cars are a great improvement on the conventional cylinder design.

Hey there, indeed, if you want a pretty good go-by, the instructions for either the Lone Ranger train or Harry Potter train MODs would be a promising start. You could literally just drop the rear axle on the Lone Ranger and you would have the configuration you need. I might have an IDEA why you need pure Lego parts, but you could easily replace the rods with technic beams. Well, you might want to move the cylinders one stud closer to the wheels on the Lone Ranger since the half wide beams only go to 7, but that would probably fit well with your prototype... though I don't know if the technic beams offer enough "play" to get it to line up, so it would take a little trial and error to make sure it works to your satisfaction. Another option would be to copy the rod mechanism from the Harry Potter train (connecting rods but no side rods) or one of the non-city steam trains that lego released over the past few years (side rods, but no connecting rods). Here is a thread with some clever ideas for adding rods to the holiday train. In any event, think of your locomotive as being just another piece of rolling stock, it is long enough that something needs to turn on a truck or otherwise bend. Your proposal is to have the motor rotate under the locomotive, you could do that, but you would probably have to do away with the connecting rods (still having quartered side rods on the wheels). I think that is how they did it on the Toy Story train. However, as the two images above show, it is not too hard to have the drive wheels rigidly fixed to the cab and boiler, then have the pilot twist (HP) or bend (LR). Hope this helps.

Brilliant!

I have a few moments to talk about more of my MOCs at BW First up is my Pioneer Zephyr. It is a couple years old and I even posted about it in this thread. But BW was only its second outing to a major show, and the first was at NMRA Indy, where there were only a dozen AFOLs. As you can see, I was fortunate enough to be nominated for the BW best train. The competition was impressive and there were many equally great train MOCs that were not even nominated, so I'm pleased to have been awarded a "nomination trophy" Next up, I had my O-gauge steamer at the show and it was running some of the time. Here too, I was able to post about this MOC in a previous EB thread. I keep making small tweaks to this locomotive, and am slowly making changes that I will report on (probably in that old thread) as they develop. As a prime example of the total sensory overload, I almost did not get a picture of one of my newest MOCs, the big blue E44 at the bottom of this shot. My son is a big fan of the last generation of electric freight locomotives in the US, so this one had to be built (of course he is a rebel and much prefers the E33 with its single pantograph and lack of skyline casing... kids these days... but he did spot the roof of a real E33 way off in the distance at IRM, so he was happy), Gotta run, but more soon...

Thank you for the kind words. There are some instructions already out there for well cars, e.g., here. The ribbed sided well cars use too many rare parts that it would not make sense to release instructions. As for the motor side frames, version 1 is already available either from shapeways, as discussed here, or from me by special request but they are stupid expensive either way (!@#$%). I'm in the process of fabricating a potential version 2 might cut the price by 10%, but I'll have to test it before releasing it to the public.

Wow, I missed this the first time around but that is very impressive! I can only assume that you had to make the move to PUP due to labor demands, I know I wouldn't want to be an engine driver on your road... (grin) Also thanks for showing off the powered up demo. Wandering a little off topic, could the PUP app programming environment be used to drive two motors simultaneously in opposite directions without any hardware modifications so that one could have a locomotive with two powered trucks?

Great part usage on the loco, and that opening image is stunning. Keep up the good work!

@ivanlan9 noted ... I'm in the front row 4th from the right, wearing a brown minifig shirt. I'll let the others out themselves (or not) as they see fit.

I missed this thread the first time around, but those are fantastic builds. Are you aware that Lego actually made an XXL door? Too bad it is only in black or white though.

That's brilliant, beautiful and great. Seeing the video of it in action is one of my favorite parts, but the SBrick control is my top favorite.

My building has slowed in the past few years, but I have been slowly building new MOCs. I kind of took BW as my opportunity to show off a couple of years worth of new building all at once. Here's the first of those MOCs So first I started making stickers to letter my trains, then I started selling stickers, then someone asked if I could do stickers for containers, then I was so tickled by them I had to make a few containers, then again I was so tickled that I had to make well cars, as per this ancient thread. But most of what I'm interested in modeling is in the 1900-1980 time frame, so I was happy with my Conrail MOD of the Maersk locomotive for pulling the well cars. Tell that to my son, who is very much interested in the trains he is growing up with. So a while back I designed an NS SD60m for him. I never got around to posting about that engine until now... I designed it with the intent to eventually make instructions for it and sell the stickers (a keen eye will note the fan stickers in the turn table base... I will have those listed in my store soon). Beyond the fans I do not have plans to produce the stickers in the short term, but who knows, if there is interest I know some people who produce instructions and stickers and maybe they'd talk to me. Anyway, this being a 6 wide locomotive (the hood is actually 5 wide to allow for the PF inside) I didn't have the space to do brick built trucks, which led to this custom motor side, and this MOC made its full debut on my display at BW this year. Then last fall I had an idea to make an unpowered mate for this locomotive. What better than the PRR heritage unit, right? The best I can figure is that Tuscan red starts out looking like Lego dark red and after about a year in the sun it winds up looking like lego red-brown. I took a little liberty with the design, I believe the pinstripes on the real unit are yellow, but I went with more PRR traditional gold, and for the same aesthetics I did away with the yellow safety stripe under the running boards (it would have been maybe half a plate high if modeled at scale). The one thing that I've been waiting and waiting for are the grilled cheese in dark red, maybe some day, but for now those are dark blay and probably the best excuse for building it in red-brown instead of dark red. Oh well, I like dark red better and this gave me an excuse to build a dark red locomotive. Here too, BW was the debut of the locomotive. (yes, that is a 10 wide observation car behind my 6 wide train) I also added another well car to my collection, this time lettered for Maersk and populated with heritage containers. More on my BW MOCs in subsequent posts.

Brickworld 2019 was total sensory overload, there were so many great models of all shapes and sizes that at some point your mind just sort of locks up. It took me a few hours to get from one end of the hall to the other and each time I would discover something new. Even if you were only interested in trains there were three or four great layouts that always had something happening. My pictures from the show have now been moderated on brickshelf and can be found here, with a generous helping of train displays. I will not go in to detail about all of the various displays and events, except to note that there was even an ILTCO meeting Well, okay, there were a couple of other train builders there too... And this really insane transformer based on the Super Chief. The builder was kind enough to take the 10 min necessary to step through the transformation. That is the same MOC displayed on tablet on the left and standing on the right. The full transformation can be found here. Meanwhile, I had a nice little display that was easily overlooked given the sheer level of goodness all around the hall. I'll post back to this thread with information about some of my new MOC's that debuted there.

That is pretty incredible if you click through the links to see the pictures. You might want to edit the first post to show the photos in the thread.

A great build, and some of the interior detailing is still evident from the exterior views, e.g., the "window blinds" in the bathroom of the car.

You definitely win the "extreme lego trains" award