Some fun artwork from the cover of the 2001 U.S. Holiday LEGO Shop at Home catalog. Palpatine guards a steam engine from the My Own Train theme, introduced in 2001. The tree is decorated with Bionicle masks, and the Sopwith Camel chases down candy cane thief, Jack Stone. There is also a healthy dose of pirates and dinosaurs.
LEGO makes a Christmas card for its employees each year, and this was the example made to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary in 1982. It is filled with vintage LEGO goodness, including loads of wooden toys, 1:43 scale Chevrolet trucks, early LEGO building toys and some 1980s LEGO sets under the Christmas tree.
If you look closely, the box of wooden toys contains a special steam engine. Those Chevrolet trucks would also look mighty nice on an O scale layout. LEGO produced wooden toys from 1932 through 1960, following a fire that destroyed the wooden toy warehouse. The plastic Chevrolet trucks were made between 1952 and 1957.
These images originally appeared in the 50 Years of Play book, a LEGO history book given to LEGO employees in 1982. The book is hard to find, but you can read the digital version online via Brickset.com.
This past weekend was crazy for myself and Glenn here at Brick Model Railroader. In short, we sold out of our first run of hopper instructions way faster than anticipated, visited a cathedral of steam, took a ride with one of the most impressive machines on rails, and got some work done on two of our future Premium Instructions. It was a crazy weekend.
Continue reading Selling Hoppers and Chasing Trains: Things we did this weekend
I hope you, our dear readers, will allow me to indulge myself once again as write about my own LEGO® train building. Today I finally bring you my two most recent articulated steam locomotive models, the Norfolk & Western A class and Y6b. Those of you who have seen a PennLUG display in person over the past year, or read issue 46 of Brickjournal have probably already seen these, but it’s taken me a little while to finally upload photos and write an article on them for Brick Model Railroader. In my defense, I’ve been busy.
Continue reading Steam Giants of the Norfolk & Western Railway
It been a while since we’ve seen a big articulated steam locomotive from LEGO® train builder Anthony Sava. But the wait is over as Anthony’s long planed model of the Duluth, Missabe, & Iron Range class M4 “Yellowstone” is finally completed.
Continue reading Duluth, Missabe, & Iron Range “Yellowstone”
This is my LEGO model of a 1940’s Central Railroad of New Jersey commuter train. This train is typical of those that made up the CNJ’s short haul commuter service in the first half of the 20th century. You may have already seen the locomotive in my recent article on Vinyl Decals, or on a recent youtube livestream. Now that the locomotive is properly decaled, I finally took some time to photograph the whole train and write this article.
The seeds for building this train were planted several years ago while on a trip to visit Steamtown National Historic Site. While there one of the locomotives that caught my attention was an odd little Canadian National engine, no. 47. Canadian National no. 47 is what is referred to as a “Suburban” locomotive. These locomotives were built for short haul service on commuter lines. The Suburban type had its tender, carrying coal and water, integrated with the main frame of the locomotive, rather than having a separate “tender” car semi-permanently coupled to the locomotive. This gave the locomotive excellent dual directional capability, handy for when there were no provisions for turn the engine around at the end of it’s run. It was not uncommon to see these engines running backwards pulling their train on a return trip.
This will be the first in a series of articles about my process of building a LEGO steam locomotive. I intend to cover a variety of topics in this series including research, the use of custom elements, aftermarket electrical devices, and building techniques. While I will focus on a specific locomotive project I am currently working on, this series will not include a full set of step-by-step instructions to that locomotive. My intention is to share some experiences and techniques that I hope people can apply to any steam locomotive project, and perhaps other types of LEGO models as well. At any rate, my designs are usually pretty fragile and don’t really lend themselves to redistribution via instructions. Instead, I will lay out my approach to building a steam locomotive and why I think it is effective. I hope that this will help people who are struggling with what I think is a particularly difficult type of model to build or, at least, be of some interest to the readers of this site.
Continue reading The Union Pacific Type – Building a Steam Locomotive in LEGO
This is the second in a series of articles documenting the creation of brick-built layout, from start to finish. For part one, see Matson’s Landing in L-Gauge – A Layout From Start to Finish.
Before starting on the layout proper, I first want to define and build my motive power and rolling stock. The actual design of the track plan, including grades, number of cars spotted, and so on, will depend upon the equipment running over it. There are a few things to consider before beginning:
Here’s what I first selected:
With my basics defined, I started researching equipment. Generally, when one thinks about logging railroads, they think about small wood-fired geared steamers slowly crawling up steep grades, pulling strings of weather-worn log cars. The big three that immediately came to my mind where Shay, Climax, and Heisler.
A lot of builders put together Shay locomotives, with good reason. They look great while running! The exterior gear shafts provide some movement not seen on rod driven machines. I don’t consider myself to be a steam builder, or a Technic builder, though, so the gearing was a little off-putting for me. A Heisler, with its gear shaft underneath, might be workable, but, due to another of my other hobbies, I had Climax locomotives on my mind. In my Live Steam life, I’m working on a 1/8th scale “Clishay” locomotive. Billed as a cross between a Shay and a Climax, the Clishay[2] screams “small logging operation”. I love the hand-built look of it, and since the gearing is pretty simple, I thought it would lend itself well to a LEGO® design. The basic layout is similar to a Class A Climax with a vertical boiler. This, then, was where I began my prototype research.
In the next installment of this series, I’ll talk about the Climax designs that I looked at, and where I am currently with the build.
[1] Bristow, Preston. “Vermont’s Long Trail and Logging Railroads.” Walloomsack Review 14:31. Accessed January 6, 2017. http://benningtonmuseum.org/library/walloomsack/volume-14/vermonts-long-trail-and-logging-railroads.pdf.
[2] For a great overview of a Live Steam scale Clishay, visit https://youtu.be/hBkAVHcHCJk.
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