Commander Wolf

At least with the regular 9v/RC motors, either the wheel spacing or wheel count would be off... so in the interest of accurate modeling, I didn't. However, now that you mention it, it might be possible to drive the tender "unconventionally" (ie with a motor and some small BBB wheels), and there's plenty of room in that thing for a battery box and the works. Definitely something to think about in a future revision! Yeah... winning the lottery would be nice The only rolling stock I have en masse right now is the green passenger car from a while ago... not quite sure if that is the best match

I think it's pretty solid if you're aiming for the same level of detail as an official Lego set... but your pictures are definitely not doing it justice. Use more light! Go outside!

Well, I didn't think this would be done in time when I first posted, but it is, so I'm entering. Last minute category 1.

I think you've got the shape more or less right, but the single color of the body is really throwing me off, even though that does seem to be the way it actually is... except for the roof. That looks like it's a black or dark grey from the pic. Also, I think the actual bogies are a lot more spindly than the Lego motors, but if you want to power it, I guess there isn't much choice.

I have enough work and hobbies such that I'm never bored

I'd be pretty surprised if anyone was the "only" of any ethnicity on a big board like this. Also Asian, but I've lived in California all my life.

Not too fond of the uncovered wheels under the locomotive, but I love the "riveted" sides of the gondola. Nice work.

It's done! Final update: Nothing exceptional about the tender build; I just had to buy a lot of those 1x2 grill bricks. The cab is identical to the one on the locomotive. The three-axle bogies have an articulation rather than a sliding axle. The former just proved easier to build and easier to fit within the required height. The pivots aren't exactly centered on the bogies such that the back of the locomotive and the front of the tender line up through curves. And a couple more video clips showing the entire thing in action with a closeup of the opposed connecting rods: Again, the entire gallery... and that's it; thanks for looking!

This. I still run into people who don't "get" Lego. One of my other hobbies is drawing, and tell people Lego is like drawing... and in addition there is an engineering component as well. Still people can't seem to shake that "toy" stereotype...

I used to be really big on filling in the visual gaps in train chassis, but if you look at the actual reference drawing, there are a lot of gaps under the locomotive - so I left them there. Unfortunately the BBB wheels currently only come in the spoke variety, so there isn't really a good way to model the more solid Scullin-type wheels without losing functionality. I would have considered putting a motor in the front bogie as the wheel spacing is actually very close, but you usually want to run two motors in a train with a locomotive as big as the ACE, so I would have needed a power car anyway. If I ever buy some PF equipment I may reconsider, but as of now most of my collection is late 90s to early 00s, so it's basically all 9v with only sprinkling of 12v. Anyway, I should have my BrickLink parts by this weekend, so stay tuned for the final product!

I'm not a big fan of cascading those tiny slope tiles in illustrating surfaces, but I like the way you paneled the sides such that it reflects the actual locomotive appearance but doesn't just look like a big wall of gray. Why are you coupling the cars with the little rubber thing? Is it just an aesthetic preference or is there some sort of benefit over the regular magnets?

Yeah, the sides of the actual locomotive are a bunch of panels with small handles, and there are some vents in there too. I would try to add the vents and re-orient the tiling (ie vertically instead of horizontally - and/or maybe use 2x2s?) to more closely follow the layout of the panels and maybe find some way to suggest the handles (ie with the 1x2 plate with offset, etc).

I think the surfaces on the locomotive are a little plain, but the track work and rolling stock is lovely! EDIT: How exactly does that decoupler work? The linked thread suggests that you need non-Lego couplers, but it looks like you have the stock couplers?

I was planning on taking some nice footage with Good Lighting ™ once everything was done... but ask and ye shall receive! These are some clips I took for a friend in order to illustrate the performance difference between a "dry" and lubricated chassis: in the first clip, I'm running a dry chassis at notch 4 (because you need that much power to keep it going), and you can see the locomotive aggressively slowing and surging in and out of the turns due to the high rolling friction. In the second clip, I'm running a lubricated chassis (with smalls dabs of synthetic motor oil at every moving joint) at just notch 2 and the slowing and surging is noticeably reduced. In both clips the motive power is provided by the venerable 10133 with two 9v motors.

Thanks for the feedback, all! Just a small update on this since the tender is still a WIP: I finally had the time to make some decals to fill that vast expanse of red. Obviously Nonsense Wars is not a real railway (that's just the name of my blog). The placement of the logo, railway, and road number is adapted from that on the 3rd generation UP GTELs, which I consider a similarly unique setup in a similar era. Following said convention, I was planning on numbering the tender as 3001B, but I'm not sure if B-unit style numbering is appropriate... I haven't yet been able to find out much info on actual tender numbering schemes, though.

Definitely 1x1 round plates or 2x2 round tiles... super versatile, you can find a good place for 'em on just about any model or assembly

Wow this is pretty intense! I think the mass of greebles strongly suggests that the thing has been heavily modded - i.e. by someone tinkering in their garage trying to squeeze every last ounce of whatever it is from the stock design. Did you actually think about what all the greebles did or just load 'em on?

I'd consider my dark ages to be my 4 to 5 years of college,simply because there was no way for me to bring my bricks with me. I have a friend whose experience was pretty similar as well (though he is still wrapping up his degree). I think I only built a single MoC that entire time - and it was for a class. I went to school pretty close to home, but it was really frustrating to only be able to work in fits and bursts on weekends, etc. Luckily those days are long gone now.

Awesome use of the garage door pieces for the solar panels. Very clever! It didn't occur to me that you could actually clip stuff to the little stubs!

Whoa! In green too (is it supposed to be a BN?)! You should post more pics if you still have it... I did a search for other builds before I started, but I didn't find anything. I love what you did for the smokestacks! Normally I cringe at taking turntables apart, but I might have to steal your idea... what are you using for the vents on the top of the tender?

Hey all, first MoC in a while here, and first train MoC in a really long time. For those who don't know, the ACE 3000 is a steam locomotive designed in the late 70s, early 80s, but obviously never built. I'm a big fan of "advanced" steam, building the SR Leader and the Wardale 5AT quite a few years ago (and I'm not even from the UK). Previously I eyeballed all of my train MoCs, but this time I referenced brick paper at a scale of about 155mm per plate height in which most United States locomotives happen to be 8-wide (this is approximately equivalent to the scale that Ben Beneke uses in his well-known 7-wide locomotives). The chassis is fully articulated with flanged wheels on all axles. It goes around curves and switches and everything between. The pairs of driving rods on each side are supposed to perfectly counterbalance each other by being 180 degrees out of phase (even at this scale you can feel the difference in vibration if you push the locomotive fast!). In the "real" thing they would have been kept that way by cranks. Here I use big bevel gears in a design once again mostly stolen from Ben. The wheels are obviously of the small and large flavor from Ben Fleskes' fantastic Big Ben Bricks product line. It was impossible to model every face and angle on the cab, so I took a drawing approach and tried to "sketch" it. I'm pretty happy with the result, and I think it does a good job of suggesting the right shape, but I'll let the viewer decide that. The cab was definitely the hardest part. The insides are held together with a bunch of silly business. The color scheme is from this concept drawing, but I am planning to eventually make my own fictional railway decals, road numbers, and the like. The entire locomotive is about 45 studs long from magnet to magnet and weights a whopping 1lb 5oz (sorry metric guys). So far I've found running performance to be pretty good in general, but there's considerable friction just because of the size and weight. I'm planning on lubricating some parts of it once the design is locked in, but I don't know how much it will help. A tender is in the works, but I am an idiot and can't properly order from BrinkLink, so I'm still waiting on some parts. EDIT: Instructions are now available for sale on Rebrickable: https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-97053/NonsenseWars/148-american-coal-enterprises-3000-v21-power-functions/#details

This is definitely very impressive for a first MoC. The prototype has a lot of characteristic curves too, which I consider difficult to model in Lego. Will definitely be interesting to see how you handle them in the finished product!

I think you should throw in like a "known ship" or something of known size in order to suggest the scale. Nice work nonetheless; I like the little dioramas that you build around your MoCs.

Funny story actually: I pulled that little tablet out of an older MoC thinking the same thing... but now that I think about it, the older MoC was built before the iPad came out, so clearly I predicted the future pretty well there XD

I went to college pretty close to home, but even then the overhead (of accessing my stuff) was enough such that I just never found the time to build anything behind my primary hobby (drawing). That being said there was an exception: I did study design and I did build one of these rolling-ball clocks out of Lego for a class, but that was basically it.