Heppeng

I think the arches are a fairly regular production item, so the moulds would be in frequent use, just not in that particular colour. Indeed I would imagine that for the more common bricks there would be several moulds to produce the required numbers. Can't believe that there would be only one mould of a 2x1 brick for example! Had to switch one order to other bricklink vendors so the price might be creeping north of £170 with postage, I will try and get an accurate tally when all is done and built!

Well I have gone and done it! I have now ordered all the bricks for my market street. I am really quite chuffed, because I have ended up with a market street that is 99.5% true to the original, for a price somewhere around £150. This is for orders from lego, and three bricklink vendors. The only compromises I have made are: 1. White 8.5 long tabbed flexible hoses replaced by White 8.5 long tabless flexible hoses. 2. Light bley doors replaced by light grey. 3. I have not purchased the minifigs and the green hairpiece which I think is supposed to be a cabbage or something. I did have some bricks from my own collection to use, but they were only a few here and there - Probably not much more than a fivers worth. One thing that really surprised me was getting the correct windows from lego - they seem to be stupidly expensive on bricklink and yet lego sells them for 38p each. Was almost tempted to buy 100 of them and start a bricklink store selling them at £2 each or so. Pretty good return, but I expect someone else will do that soon and the bricklink price will tumble - I think someone is already selling 100 of the blue arches at £1 each... I must also say excellent customer service from lego, they allowed me to change my order quite a bit once I had double checked bricklink prices and found even more bricks that it was cheaper to buy new from lego!

Yes they are, 55p each. I think that when they became available they forgot to update the market street inventory, so it still shows unavailable on there, but if you go to the winter village market inventory they are available, so you can just add them to your basket from there instead.

There are quite a few bits it is worth getting new from lego, besides the arches. Window frames - Bricklink average price £3.99, lego price new 38p, and as you need 10 thats a hell of a saving!! I am also looking to buy all the medium and dark blue 1x2 and 1x4 bricks from lego, 11p and 19p respectively. I was looking at substituting different shapes to get the price down on bricklick, but then realised that it would only be slightly more expensive to get them from lego brand new, and then all the bricks would be the right shape, And the extra cost would be mitigated somewhat by needing fewer bricklink orders - and thus less postage. I will have a closer look at the rest of the inventory to see if it is worth adding anything else to the lego order hopefully this weekend.

Ironically a Zebra crossing does not have red/green either, just a flashing yellow beacon as here:

I had exactly this problem too. There is a very simple solution - hold it closed under a hot hairdryer for a few seconds. The heat softens the plastic at the join a little, and it will then take up its closed shape rather than trying to pop open. No glue, no change in appearance, quick and no hassle

If you think the GE is a bit sparse and have got the 2013 City advent calender you can fill the toy department at the top to overflowing, complete with Christmas tree and Santa handing out presents if you want! The second floor homeware can also get a fireplace, table, more glasses bottles etc and even a barbeque to sell (although I suppose it is a bit out of season if the upper floor is Christmas...)

The easiest route would be to use the lego compatable chassis that come in the Demolition Derby set: But that might depend on your budget - complete set is £99 I believe.

I have not heard of the gears giving problems, and I know that some of the EN's on here take quite a pounding on long trains. And even if they did wear out eventually, the beauty of lego makes for easy replacement!

Good stuff! It is a little unfortunate I came out of my dark ages just after the last but one posts so I managed to miss it first time around - I might of otherwise ended up building one of these!

I am in the same situation - will be watching this thread closely!

Those TTX double stacks of yours are rather tasty!

I wanted to have a couple of double stack intermodals for my North American style freight train. Unfortunately the double stack offerings from lego are discontinued, and in any case they used small containers. I wanted something that could take the same size containers as my other models. This is the result: Here we have a container from the 7939 freight train set stacked on a Maersk container. It recreates the situation where a longer container that could not fit in the pocket was stacked on one that could. In order to keep the height down I did cheat a little - the base of the Maersk is removed and it is built directly on the wagon chassis so it is a permanent fixture. Because the base is completely hidden, it just gives the impression that it is sitting lower in the wagon rather than being a little less tall. Many of the lego versions of the double stack ended up with quite a number of plates etc. between the wagon base and the container, so much so that on some the container in the pocket was only very slightly lower than if it was on a flat deck! I also included a couple of air brake tanks and hand brake wheels for extra detail.

I was thinking it would look good to the left of Market Street (As viewed from the front) I expect the the two open areas would compliment each other and help view the details on the side and of course the rear seating area. Indeed I am seriously considering Bricklinking a Market street just to go with the PR!

I think S@H has been having a few glitches - Parisian Restaurant was accidentally made available too soon and people ordered it only to have their order cancelled, and I am not sure if they have managed to sort out that knot that they have tied themselves into from that yet, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were other things not going smoothly also.

As no-one seems to have mentioned it yet... Parisian Restaurant!

Ordered mine from the GB site no problem - wonder how long it will be before they sell all of the first run!

Reproduction stickers are available from http://www.ministickers.nl/ (JopieK). From the reviews I understand that they are indistinguishable from the real thing. I have built this set in red (including the lights mod) and need to get around to ordering the stickers...

I wanted to use some VIP points to get this, but the bugs appear to prevent me from doing so. So ironically because I am a VIP I will need to wait longer until they have sorted it out!!!

I like that, you've caught the feautures well. Reminds me of the blue ones run by Wreakin's.

Thats absolutely great! I like that they are using 12V tracks!

This is the first lego advent calender that I have had and i think it is fantastic! Almost all the models in it have been allocated suitable further use - the toys/presents/Christmas tree will end up added to the top floor of the Grand Emporium, the fireplace and tableware will be added to the 'homeware' second floor, Firewoman will be added to the Fire Brigade. I like the way you have even got the Robot/digger toasting a sausage on the Barbie! Someone thought it was odd having a barbeque on a Christmas advent calender, maybe out of season perhaps. My somewhat perceptive daughter reminded me that it's Christmas in Austrailia too, where this calender may be sold also, where of course barbeques at Christmas are somewhat more usual!

You might want to consider a feedback type of controller that measures motor speed and automatically adjusts its output to keep it constant - I use a cheap Hornby R965 which has got my PF motors running under perfect control.

You could always send it to one of those 419 baiter websites, they know how to play along to the scammers, their main purpose being to waste the 419er's time so that they are not scamming someone else n the meantime, often with entertaining results!!!

I'll second that! The only downside to it is that because it checks out all possible permutations of all stores and parts, if you have a large list of common parts it takes a very long time to run through the millions of possible combinations before arriving at the cheapest answer. One other advantage is that it will automatically split parts between stores - ie if the cheapest store has less than your minimum quantity of that part, it will still include them and suggest the balance from the next cheapest if you see what I mean, Whereas a bricklink search for 'parts on my wanted list' would have excluded them on the grounds of not meeting the minimum quantity.