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Last week I had a display at Titanic Belfast. They have the travelling Brick City exhibition and to add some excitement there was the Big Build weekend. A number of brick.ie members exhibited; Oiley brought part of his fleet and his army and his new model, the battle of Rorke's Drift. Janet VanD had brought an impressive Tomb Raider level and Dfenz was showing Heuston Station and other Dublin buildings. My contribution was this layout; my German station Neuffen, the old engine shed, the goods shed, the signal box and some of Daisy Duqs landscaping: Big Build layout by Duq, on Flickr For this show I MILSified my display. Rather than having the track just on a baseplate the landscape is a brick up as can be seen in this picture of a typical lazy construction crew: Construction crew by Duq, on Flickr The layer of black bricks around the outside looks good but more importantly it makes the modules a lot more rigid which in turn made setting up a lot easier than before. The downside of course is more weight and volume to transport. At the moment I have 4 steam engines; My own BR55, BR65 and BR70 and a copy of Bens well-known BR23. All four were running as well as my little Kof II. Unfortunately none ran trouble-free... The Kof ran mostly ok until I didn't slow down in time for a corner and it flew off the track... It didn't take long to rebuild. I think it scared the public more than it did me. Apart from that it pulled a short freight train for hours on end without complaining. Both the BR70 and BR23 need to be pushed by a motorised carriage. The BR23 ran fine but I did find out why the instructions specify the long shaft version of the 2x2 plate with tow ball. With the short version the cab hits off the tender in corners so I had to remove some pieces to make it work. The BR70 started out ok but after a while it slowed down and the motor began to stutter. Initially I thought it was a dying 9V train motor but on closer inspection it turned out to be the running gear. There was a little too much play in the way the cylinders were attached which resulted in it binding at one point in the cycle. Resolving this meant emergency repairs. Luckily I had enough spares with me... Repairs by Duq, on Flickr The BR65 struggled more and more in corners. I suspect it's the wheelbase; FBBF is too long for L drivers. That means I have to change it to FBFB or BFBF but either way means an enormous overhang in corners so I'm not sure what I'll do about this. Maybe I'll wait for the ME-Models wide turns. Finally the BR55. It ran fine for a while but eventually the driving gear started to snag and it pulled itself apart (yes, that L-motor is quite powerfull!). I tried a few things but ran out of spares on this one. In the end I put her back together the same way as before and she ran trouble-free again. Still, I need to do some more work on those custom driving and connecting rods to make them more reliable. I guess the moral of the story is that building steam trains is really difficult...
