zephyr1934

Not true, if you get close enough you can see where the studs should say "Lego" they actually have a BT logo. (grin... but true, they are that good)

The locos are great with lots of details (the pilot/plow on the Siemens is simple yet brilliant), the steamers are fantastic, and the goods vans are smashing.

Very nice crossing, smooth operation and the station looks good. The dark red profile bricks work well in this model. Too bad, that would have been interesting to see, in its absence (next time) you could build up remnants of a foundation as if the building had been torn down so as to preserve and present the footprint, without the building having to actually be built. All sorts of strange things in the background (an SP black widow Alco in Poland?) but I clicked on the link to your friends trains and that makes sense. And did I see the lower part of the legs for a full sized C3P0? Is that an official lego build or was that an insanely huge MOC?

A thing of beauty! Thanks for sharing the design process. The L-motor mounting is ingenious, could you rotate it 90° and hide it in the firebox? Then there should be enough room to sneak half beams between the motor and wheels for strength. Another thought, with the EN and other 6 wide locomotives it is impossible (well... difficult and I've not seen it done) to get the hubs (as an American I'm not sure the right word for the 1x4 curved slopes) low enough for the wheels to actually be "below" them. At 8 wide you could do that (and it looks like the flanges are behind them), would it be possible to lower them another plate?

That is an exciting prospect to be able to program trains using color bricks. In your experiments, is there hope to 1) control the WeDo motor as if it were a train motor (set power level once and it will maintain that until a new command comes in) 2) control both ports on the hub with one input 3) use one input to make motor A go forward and motor B go in reverse at exactly the same speed (so we can have two motors under one engine, without a pole reverser... that does not exist) If yes to all of the above, that means non-train motor designs have hope and the prospect of not only having two motor locos, but also multiple unit locomotives working together would be great.

You mean she's one of these? They're just curvy on the ends (grin, couldn't resist).

Some folks have used O gauged wheels for lego trains, particularly for 9v power pickups. I think there is one particular small volume manufacturer that has wheels close to the stock lego wheels (I have no idea who it was). Other folks have machined their own lego train wheels from metal. I had talked to a couple of people who had prototypes of the BBB track, I think ultimately the rail stock was too strong for the clutch of the bricks and at the very least the rails would "split" and adopt a wider gauge. In the mean time ME looked like they had a workable solution (turns out they didn't, but it kind of worked for a couple of years if you overlook all of the kickstarter backers who never got their parts). I THINK elements of the BBB design were incorporated into the last iteration of the ME metal tracks that never saw production. Now we have Bricktracks taking the right pace with injection molded track, there is clearly a lot of design and testing behind their track.

It was not in the video linked in this thread, you had to go in to the facebook folder and there was a whole series of videos.

Wow, you might have found the winner. Looking through that list, he designed some of my favorite sets from my childhood.

I thought the trains were scheduled for Aug 1 in the US and July 1 in Europe (while HP is the reverse)

Definitely to LBG instead of old gray (in fact the Santa Fe cars had pearl gray grill bricks for the sides). I personally did not like the dark gray baseplates under an essentially light gray build (the real cars would be the same color on those parts... stainless steel... but what have you). If you are going for reproducing the cars, then dark bluish gray would work fine. For the roof, I'd suggest using 1x3 curved slopes or 2x4 curved slopes. The gray train wheel holders and buffer beams are pricey, black will be a lot cheaper. Like the others, I would recommend doing a repaint with bits and pieces updated here and there. Many of my first MOCs included repaints of the Santa Fe cars, here are some links if you want inspiration CB&Q/DRGW, C&O, GN, CMSTP&P, and N&W.

In one of the Hispa-bricks videos (I think it was back in this thread) they demonstrated three hubs synchronized on one channel, remote says "go" all three motors go. I bet there is some upper limit to the number of hubs per channel, but I haven't seen anything yet (and no, I have no inside information, I'm just gathering bits from what has been posted). One thing I suppose with distributed power like this your batteries will last longer, but if the hubs are expensive that could get pricey.

Very nice! I Trust your report card for this term will have two A's and two B's?

In this sense it is just like PF, only now with 5 channels. So one "hub" and motor per train, 5 channels port 1 + 5 channels port 2 = 10. But it looks like now each channel is limited to one motor "How many motors can be controlled with one Smarthub? The Smarthub has two ports, A and B, which allow you to plug in and control two motors, or a motor and lights for example." In this case, with two hubs, one in the front and one in the back, both on the same channel. This bit should work better than PF since they should operate in sync without worry of line of sight.

Excellently detailed bit of the trackside environment

BBB did some wonderful engineering to get all the dimensions right from day one, e.g., the way the flanged drivers fit so snugly behind the blind drivers, or the fact that the small flanged wheels will fit in a 3 stud gap (I am pretty sure the lego motor wheels will not). There are a lot of really nice specialized designs (I'm still drooling over Shupp's boxpok drivers with several different counterweight options) that I doubt make sense to attempt to make injection moulds for. On the other hand, BBB will probably beat 3D printing in terms of color matching and tolerance for some time. One functionality that might be good to add to the BBB lineup would be an option for traction band groves on the flanged drivers (while keeping the non-groved drivers in the line up as well) There might be demand for the smallest of BBB wheels with a pin hole. I could also see potential demand for the small wheels with solid instead of spokes, but given the fact that the standard Lego train wheels are so close, maybe that demand is already consumed.

Oh wow, what a thing of beauty! Excellent work

With some modification I bet this 1971 design could be shrunk to 3 wide given the new parts developed since then

Excellent question

Yes, that's what I meant, and since the .xlf is out there I'm open to selling them in the wild too, so if there are others, feel free to PM as well. In any event it will be many weeks before I can do a print run. See you in PM land...

Yes, you are keeping several steps ahead of the lego folks, excellent build and rebuild!

Looking good and impressive to see these long cars handle the tight curves of your layout. I was going to ask you how well they handle on curves, but your video gave some pretty impressive clarity to that question already. With my well cars I had problems with the wheels running in to my underframe, but I have end walls in my wells and you were able to make it work without them (I tend to overdesign, and the end walls provide an extra 2-3 studs for attachment). My solution was to use panels to give room for the trucks to turn behind the end walls. That's a great trick, but it adds something like a quarter plate in width. In your case that probably works well with the twisted bricks of the containers that make them slightly wider than 6 wide as well. In my build I used two 1x2 x 1x2 up brackets held together by a 2x2 tile (you can barely see it in this photo) The ribbing effect looks good, but it is also a design trade off, one would be hard pressed to do the ribs AND stickers. If one wanted the best of both worlds I suppose you could go the route of the Maersk containers and have a flat section for the stickers and the rest be ribbed. On the other hand, the price comes down a lot if you use the normal 1x6x5 panels, but the 6x plates and all the tiles for the roof are hard to avoid. These are all design trade offs, there is no single best answer. If you are interested I could probably adjust the stickers from this design to fit your build, just send me a PM. Be warned though, that I am on holiday, so it would be weeks before I could print them.

Portholes all the way, you really need to track down the prototype and fix that one (grin).

In the text under one of the HispaBricks videos they thanked someone at TLG for providing a second set to allow them to continue their experiments, perhaps they would do likewise for you...

Nope nope nope, they never shared anything secret with me when I was an ambassador. Mark Bellis was involved in the PF development though. I can not quickly find a link where he specifically mentioned that, but here's one where he alludes to it.