peterab

No Brickvention reveal, Jim Foulds the LEGO Community Overseer said the timing of Brickvention just before the large European and NY toy fairs made it unlikely for anything to premier at BV.

Not my choice in style, I'm more of a fairing kind of guy, but I do think it's safest to put all ex girlfriends under cement :-P

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This is exactly what the ambassadors are for. If you feel strongly enough about it start a thread in the ambassadors forum. I'm pretty sure this has been brought up before though and the result is the straight and flex pack.

As far as instructions go the best site I know is Railbricks. I'm not sure about flat cars but at a guess I'd say you'd be likely to find an American styled one there. For official instructions I like to use Peeron. Most of the train community don't make instructions as such, but will often show tricky techniques off in their photo sets on flickr and brickshelf. You get pretty good at reverse engineering from photos after a while. There are a few exceptions; do a search for Ben on brickshelf, most of his train folders include ldraw files which you can use to recreate the model.

Gambort would be able to give you a definitive answer since he worked on the set, but I'd guess there might be restrictions on if they can be released or not.

It appears it is fixed but with at least two variations. I've seen reports of boxes with only two fishermen, and reports of boxes with three fishermen. Earlier boxes from the US had two, there have been more recent reports of three.

Another consideration is price per part. I think you'll get a better deal with EN & MMV than the two licenced sets, and they have a nice selection of less common colours. If you get the two licensed trains you'll get a few more train parts such as wheel sets and magnets.

I just noticed an article on Railbricks. It seem to imply we would be able to control both RC and PF trains with this new 'sensor' brick.

Yes it can take some time for BS to moderate and make new folders public. To get around this you can deeplink images into your post. There are tutorials on how to post images on Eurobricks (you link to other photohosting sites like Brickshelf, flickr or MocPages) you should check out.

I just was speculating on the commitee mailing list about this. I'd love you to be correct. I'll be acting as guide for Jim Foulds (The LEGO Community Overseer) on the 15 which is the AFOL day of Brickvention. If he's going to reveal anything at Brickvention, that would be the day. The 16th is a public exhibition day so all the presentations happen the day before. Does anybody know if local AFOLs get to build the models when these previews happen? Are they full packaged sets or does the model come pre built like a display? Unless TLG are keeping that as a surprise from the committee Jamie isn't coming. I'd love it if he was, I'm a big fan.

It is an on off switch, centre is off, either direction is on but with reversed polarity from each other. The green gunk is rust, probably caused by a battery leak. You will need to completely remove this to have any hope of a good contact. A fine sandpaper may help. It can sometimes be impossible to repair this sort of damage. Some types of the plugs can be compressed, and if so wont make a firm fit anymore, gently expanding them fixes this. Other things that might also be worth checking for; There is a contact on the lid of the battery car (connects to the side wall of the car) which can be bent and will mean the circuit is not complete. Gently bending it back will fix it. The contacts either end of the batteries can also be flattened so an open circuit exists. Bending should fix those too. There is a button under the battery car which is designed to make an open circuit, it allows the signals to stop the train. Sometimes this has been pushed too hard, and will result in a permanent open circuit. Guess what the fix is? You may be able to save yourself a bit of time by testing if the motor works without the battery box, just take one C cell between a couple of single strands of wire, with the other ends into the motor, it should turn slowly. After that introduce more of the circuit to try and find the bit not working. Apart from bad battery leaks I've had some success getting these working again so you should be able to get it up and running again. Good luck.

I'm 45 and I've been an AFOL since my late 20s. I don't really hide the fact and most of my friends know and since they are mostly geeks don't have a problem with it. My partner doesn't have a problem with it, she knits so she understands creative hobbies. My wider family also know or there would be no hope of Lego presents. I'm a member of a LUG and on the organization committee for Brickvention so there are times when I promote the fact I'm an AFOL but otherwise I don't really push it unless people are interested. I have had friends bring their kids over for play dates with my Lego on occasion. As far as anybody reacting negatively to it, I see that more a reflection on their lack of imagination or tolerance. I can completely understand others not being interested but anything more than that is their problem, since at that point I really don't care, either about their opinion or them.

Welcome to Train Tech L@go and Cpt. Stabbin. We've all seen the EN but your landscape works very well :-) Peter

I'd like to see a crossing, stub switches so yards are easier, a 3 way switch, a Y, larger radius curves and left and right curved switches in that order. It's pretty easy to set them so you have two trains traveling around a double loop as long as each train travels in different directions around the loop, just as they would on parallel tracks on the real thing anyway.They would be more flexible if each section were independently switchable but they are still useful.

Could you post a link to your store so I can keep an eye out for it if you do reopen? Also do you make replacements for the old 12V and 4.5V trains? I'd love some of those. I've got a couple of sticker sheets from that era if you need some scans to work from. Peter

The designs will be copyright in most places by default with or without the marking. That doesn't mean TLG will enforce the copyright, but I imagine they would be more likely to for the current trains.

This is what most of us do. Here is a useful picture of where turntables will line up correctly. Even if you don't want to use a whole layer of plates Dave Sterling did a ballast study that might give you ideas here. On a side note for our M>LTC show layouts we don't use turntables or tiles, just black plates, which have the same problem as baseplates; you can't connect curves, turnouts, or diagonal track. We just connect the straight track where we can and if there's enough of it it tends to keep the curves in place floating above a baseplate.

Look at the amount of plastic required to make an equivalent length, and consider that each train set requires at least a circle. I'm sure it would be cheaper to include 16 curves than 64 flex pieces. While I find the flex track a bit ugly, I'm just finalizing a layout for a convention. My layout attaches to the next one via a bridge which has one stud between tracks. While I think this is a bit of a horrid design for 9V/PF track, the flex saved the day for me, and has been very useful for the turntable I'm also including in my layout. That being said I've probably already got enough from the two 2010 train sets and would rather be able to buy straights separately.

While the flex track has its uses, it's not perfect, and can cause derailments at top speed. Then again lego trains can derail on curves at top speed too. The curves are also sold with the turnouts, four curves to each pair, so even if I never buy a train set again, I'll still be getting more curves when I buy turnouts. I doubt TLG would ever stop producing straights and curves, since we get 16 flex track to replace 8 curves in the new set I'd guess the cost to produce 2 flex tracks is similar to 1 curve. To replace a complete circle (for example in a train set) you need 64, ie 4 for each curve, so that would appear to be a more expensive way for lego to go.

By the looks of it I'm the first to post from 2011 (in my time zone at least) so happy new year from the future, you're all gonna really love the flying cars.

That would be great, and I'll be happy to see them no matter how long it takes. Your design process seems similar to mine, just you seem to get better results quicker :-) Luckily I like the challenge so the time I'm spending is part of the enjoyment. Taking so long also avoids me having to invest in better camera gear Eventually I hope to post a bunch of mocs online but at the moment I'm still tinkering with most as I'm not completely happy. Most of the stuff I build remain part of my train layout so there's no rush for me to present them before I dismantle them.

I watch for every new German steam train on flickr, MocPages and Brickshelf, and I'm pretty sure I've seen all of the ones from the past. Yours is among the best. I've spent almost 2 years tweaking my BR 50, and still have a long way to go. The fact that you have it running, with multiple power options, is testament to your natural talent as a builder. I'd be happy if I could do such a good mechanical job in a month, let alone your detailing which combines a high level of accuracy in the greebles, while preserving the clean lines of the boiler of the prototype. If you were to completely emulate Ben and provide an LDraw file of your model I wouldn't even contemplate designing a BR01 (my plan after the BR50 is finished), I'd just build yours. In fact if you planned to sell the instructions like Sava, I'd be a buyer. Edit: I just visited your ship WIP; do you mean to go to every theme and outdo the best builders? You've made a good start so far

Mads Nipper of LEGO’s Corporate Management in this statement implies heavily that the European market is being used to subsidize the US. I believe they hoped the low US dollar would be temporary, but now are forced to raise US prices to bring the subsidy to an end since your dollar hasn't rebounded yet. Your tax argument is fatally flawed I think, since our prices are about double yours in most cases. Since LEGO isn't manufactured either in the US or Australia (currently Denmark, Mexico, China & Czech republic and maybe Poland and Hungary too still) the cost of the production chain will be the same regardless of taxes, that leaves just shipping and retail, and for most big box stores that's the same step so only one lot of taxes. Oh and in case you wish to dismiss this as an incomplete understanding because it is simplified (though not I believe in any relevant way), I'll just add I worked at our tax department for some years dealing with group tax (collection of employee tax though company wage deductions) so have a reasonable understanding of taxes payed by companies in Australia. What is more likely to cause a cost difference is scale of the market, though frankly given that while we are a much smaller market, 90% of Australians live in one of a handful of large cities mostly along the east coast, our shipping should be way more efficient that covering all of small town America. Which leads us back to statements by TLG that the pricing model in each market is based on the prices of a whole raft of consumer products, i.e. they charge what a market will bear. Perhaps the fact you complain about prices that are cheaper than the rest of the world pays is part of the answer. I don't want you to feel guilty about US prices, I don't when I shop from US bricklink stores, in fact I shop from the US when I can to put downward price pressure on my local prices.

Most of the polybags have more common torso prints on them, perhaps the bigger production means the margins become better. Polybags rarely come to Australia either. Not only that polybags are often associated with promotional activity, and in your example exclusives, which means the price the retailer pays is higher because of the smaller run and exclusivity. Often they are given away free, so the pricing model isn't a regular retail one but how much promotional budget there is to spend. I think the limited S1 & S2 distribution in the states explains why they went with the lower margins. Perhaps they were looking at the initial US distribution as a loss leader to establish the popularity of the figs with the large chains. Part of the explaination of the limited supply was the chains didn't order many. By the time people were complaining that they couldn't find series 1 production for series 2 had already been finished, and I guess that was based on low earlier pre-orders from the retailers. Once they flew off the shelves TLG must have decided that to make the whole thing profitable in the US, the RRP needed to be higher. We know why, TLG have stated in the past that a) they charge what each market will bear, and b) due to the global financial crises they had deliberately decided to keep prices lower in the US. Which amounts to the rest of the world subsidizing the US market.