Duq

First tip: use the 'Share' button in Flickr, 'Grab the BBCode', 'Medium'. Then copy that code and paste in your post. Result: IMG_0481[1] by Edsmith0075, on Flickr Secondly your gearing. According to Philo's motor comparison the XL motor turns at 146rpm at 9V, while the M motor turns at 275rpm at 9V. The EN is geared at 20:12 or 1.667:1 while your baggage car has 1:1 gearing. The wheels on the EN have a diameter of 30.4mm, the small wheels on the baggage have a diameter of 17.6mm (source). This gives relative speeds of 146x1.667x30.4 vs 275x1x17.6 or 7397 vs 4840. In other words, with your current gearing the baggage car would run at 2/3 of the speed of the engine. If you change the gearing of the baggage car to 20:12 like the engine then it would run at 10% faster than the engine. It'll probably be hard to get the speeds closer than that without many more gears...

Ah... I didn't realise you had a motor in the engine already. That changes things completely. When you say you read that it's impossible to get a 1:1 ratio I think what that means is that with an XL motor and large wheels in the engine and M motors and small wheels in the baggage car you can't get them both to run the same speed. I've never done the maths on that, I don't know how close you could get them. Would the motors be controlled by the same output on the receiver? The receivers have a limited amount of power they can supply. I think an XL and two M motors would be more than the receiver can handle. If you put them on different outputs then you have to somehow keep the outputs on the same level. My main question though is: why? How many cars do you have behind your EN that you need extra motors?

Thanks guys! Don't worry about BR's running out. Nothing wrong with different interpretations of prototypes. The BR 94 is still on my todo list for example...

Wow! That is one epic machine! You've got all the characteristic details covered and even the fans are spinning! The only thing is the wire between the engine and the tender... I know you need a bit of a loop to allow for movement but it would look much better if you could shorten that so it no longer appears above the roof.

Thanks for the complements guys. @Hrw-Amen: You're right, the sides of the tender are a bit too low. However taking off a plate would leave them too short and would not leave much space for detailing. Moving the whole tender up a plate would make it too tall compared to the engine. It's all about compromises...

After building two tank engines, the BR 070 and BR 065 I thought it was time for something with a tender. There are many to choose from in Germany but in the end I picked the BR 055. There aren't many pictures of the real thing online so I mostly based my model on pictures from the likes of Fleischmann and Marklin. Grunneger also helped me out with some pictures he took himself of a BR 055 as well as a blue print from a book in his collection. Thanks! Using a little tool I wrote back in the VB6 days I put a brick grid on the blueprint. Apart from the gap between engine and tender I've managed to stay pretty close: The tender on this engine has quite a tricky shape at the back. With some snotting in all directions it worked out quite well. Oh, and underneath all the snot I had to get the wires in for the lights. The battery and receiver completely filled the tender so the (PF-L) motor had to fit in the engine. Not easy, because I wanted to keep that gap underneath the boiler: The driving gear wasn't easy either. The initial version had some issues with the rods catching eachother as documented here. This version works a treat though. Going round corners is always difficult. The tight curves are the reason that the gap between engine and tender is much bigger than in real life. To keep that gap as small as possible the flanged drivers are on the second and fourth axle. That unfortunately results in the front hanging well outside the track in turns. Compromises... The tender itself also took some tinkering. It has three axles and they are too far apart to make it around a corner if they were rigid. With the way I did the detailing on the side there was no room for the normal sliding axle. In the end the solution was to make a 5-wide axle; the middle wheels never touch the rails at the same time but they're close enough to look ok from the side. Overall I'm quite pleased with how this engine turned out. I may paint the rods and add some stickers at some stage but that's about it. Looking forward to running it on a layout now.

The BR 55 is online so here's my solution for the pin collision/rod collision problem: BR 55 See-through by Duq, on Flickr

Option 1: Using a #2 axle on each wheel; the track will stop the wheels touching the inside of the cab, the cab will stop the wheels falling off when you pick it up. Option 2: Between those 2x4 curved panels there's more than 5 studs and as Peterab said the axle can go into an anti-stud so I guess together that'll just allow a #6 axle. Option 3: Using a 5.5 axle with stop.

That's another nice Köf. With tiny engines like these not having to worry about motors and batteries makes a difference to detailing doesn't it? Have you tried to Google 'Köf II'?

Sounds like you're new to the world of gears. In short: If you go from a bigger to a smaller gear then the next axle will spin faster but have less power. So if you put a 20t gear on your motor and a 12t gear on the bogie, then the train wheels would go 20:12 or 1.66 times faster than the motor. However they would also have 1.66 times less power, so the motor would struggle to get a heavy train moving. Small gear on the motor and bigger gear on the bogie would slow the train down but make it stronger, so it could pull more cars or get up an incline.

Hey Axle, nice to see an Irish engine. Surprised to see you did most of it in grey; it looks black in the painting. By the way, are you a member of brick.ie yet?

Yeah, it's been a little while hasn't it? Been busy with lots of things lately, not just Lego. I've nearly got the engine finished, just waiting for the final parts before I can take pictures and post them here. A little more patience please. Trust me, it'll be worth it.... Just haven't had the time to put my solution into MLCad... I had tried the reversed pin but without the ring there is too much play in the connection. As for cylinders, I really like those 3x3 T beams on their side. They make it easy to have the centre of the cylinder at the same height as the drive axles.

Sounds like a great event! Good luck with the Guinness guys, I hope all works out and you'll get your world record. If I was still in Holland I'd probably get on the bike and ride up but from Ireland it's a bit of a trip...

I have absolutely no idea what this is about....

That's the battery that goes into the box I showed. I've used that battery in my KöF. It's a light little engine and even that doesn't last long on those batteries... Adding the 4 studs really works, the proportions look much better now.

If this is the 9V battery box you have in mind you may have a problem: Your train won't last very long on that type of battery... As for the grey windscreen, you'll either need to do it all in muddy dark grey, change the design to use another piece or use stickers on a regular 2x6x2 windscreen.

I thought we were mainly talking about the exclusive/creator expert type of sets. Looking at the regular train sets I still don't see many German diesels. 7897 is certainly based on the ICE. It's German, but not a diesel. I don't know much about Swedish trains but I always thought 7898 was based on the E44. Again, German but not a diesel. 3677 is a diesel alright and is indeed a fairly generic European freight machine, for example it could be the Dutch class 6400. The current sets 7938 & 7939 are also generic designs but since both have pantographs they're not diesels. I'd like to see one of the classic German steam loco's. Not very likely for the next set (see comments above, chances are it'll be a US train) although it would be nice for the 35th anniversary of the classic 7750...

Absolutely. Except the Emerald night, the Maersk, the Horizon Express...

Promising start! I feel sorry for the driver though...

Yes, we should. And as soon as we win the feckin' lotto we will...

After Emerald Night, Maersk, Horizon Express my guess would be that the next one will be an American model again although if you include the Super Chief and BNSF the US are already ahead.... Another freight diesel seems unlikely. The most iconic US engine I could think of (with my limited knowledge of American railway history) would be Big Boy. As that's a 4-8-8-4 (or 2D-D2) it's an unlikely choice as Zephyr rightly points out so maybe its smaller cousin the Challenger? That's a 4-6-6-4...

That's a nice train you have there. I'd love to see what it looks like in a bend, with the pivot point of the bogie so far back.

That's impressive... I love the well-engineered chassis. Pity it can't run on its own. Are you planning an upgrade in future to add motors?

Paul, you just beat me to it. I also found a few of those flexi axles in my collection.

The cv joints can do the angles. Esben Kolind used them to power the doors in his commuter train: [link] You'll probably want to use half beams/liftarms for the pulling connection and only use the cv joints for drive train. The torque that BMW describes may still be an issue and may cause derailings. Please post pictures if you get it to work.