Now that OcTRAINber 2018: The Foreign Challenge is officially over, we first would like to thank all the participants who made this such a great month again. It was amazing to see all the WIP stories showing up on the Flickr feeds, FB timelines, but also on the well-beloved Train Tech forums over at Eurobricks for example. So thank you all for that!

Now, let’s go over the timeline. In the next coming weeks our judges will go over all the entries and score them according to three criteria: WIP Story, Credibility and The Foreign Factor. This might take a while because BMR is a labour of love, meaning we all do this stuff next to our real life lives.

However, for now we would like to make a short round-up of all entries and also to show you some of the key statistics of this years OcTRAINber.

Stats

So let’s begin with the latter, the statistics. First of all, in our Digital Entries we had this year a total of 9 contestants, and in our Real Life Entries we had 26 contestants. To compare: Last year we had 16 Digital Entries and 33 Real Life Entries. However… Last year we also allowed fantasy models, but to due to this years theme we couldn’t allow this. So, if we correct for this, last year we had 13 Digital Entries and 23 Real Life Entries that were based in the real world. Not so bad, right? Ok ok it’s a bit of a strech, but due to the extra rules this year, we had expected this to begin with.

Next to this, the number of new contestants. This is interesting since it tells us about how the community is growing, and if people actually like OcTRAINber 😉 So, in Digital Entries we had 6 new contestants, and 3 returning. In the Real Life Entries we had 15 new contestants, meaning 11 returning, including one who made the jump from Digital Entries to Real Life builds (kudos for that jump!). Some great numbers we think, and this definately gives us some good ideas already for a potential OcTRAINber 2019 edition.

Lasty, our reach. This is a difficult one since we don’t really keep track of this one, but we have seen enthousiasm in all different social media; mostly on Flickr, Facebook, Instagram and Eurobricks. It seems that most of the Lego Train builders were pretty well aware of the contest, so that’s definately a good thing.

WIPs

Even more important than stats are the actual builds. To begin I would like to put some extra emphasis on the WIP stories of all builders. Some of them were posted together with their entries, but some of them kept some very cool diaries during building, which they crossposted to the WIP stories thread over at our Flickr Page. It would be too much to quote them all here, but I recommend everybody to read those entries. It gives some awesome insights in how these builds came to life and how different builders have different approaches when it comes to building with Legos. I’m sure that all of us, from novice to expert, can learn a thing or two from this thread, just like I did when I was browsing through them.

Entries

And now, in no particular order (since we haven’t done any judging as of yet), we would shortly like to present all builds of this years OcTRAINber.

Real Life Entries

Enoden 300 Series by Beck

The Swiss Crocodile Ce 6/8 III by HA Bricks

Digital Entries

And now? Now we wait. So stay tuned for Judgement Day!