New year, new competition!
Hello everyone, and happy Autumn!
With September drawing to a close, and October quickly approaching, the time has come to announce our latest installment of our OcTRAINber build competition!
This year, the challenge is…
The foreign challenge!
The goal foreign challenge is to promote outside-the-box thinking and change up people’s build lists. In general, most builders tend to stick with what they know, which is often what is local to them. As such, not as many people break that mold and build something that is not local to them. Hopefully all participants can appreciate building something out of their comfort zone! BMR is certainly excited about this challenge, and we hope to see many rise to the occasion.
Rules:
- “Foreign” is defined as: Any locomotive, rolling stock, structure, or other railroad-related item that was NOT designed OR used in the native country of the builder. So, being from the Unites States, I could not enter legitimately with a United States locomotive such as a Santa Fe F7. I’m sure you get the point.
- Entries must be original models. No stealing.
- We are making no rules for the scale you choose to model in. We are welcoming models of 6, 7, and 8 studs, and anything in between or beyond. However, we appreciate detail and accuracy. Reasonably sized models are usually better for that, but we don’t knock anything or anyone with serious skill.
- NEW BUILDS ONLY. We are willing to accept anything unpublished or anything that was not published before September 1st 2018 as new. We want to inspire and promote a challenging build, entering an old model doesn’t quite work in that regard.
- Entries MUST be made on our Flickr group in the appropriate thread: real-life entries in the real-life thread, and digital entries in the digital thread. This is the ONLY place we will be looking for entries, nowhere else. Sending photos to us on social media or showing us in person do not count as entries.
- We will be accepting entries from Midnight on October 1st to midnight on November 1st. There is possibility of a grace period to ensure those that need that one final Bricklink order have a fair chance.
Entries and Prizes
We are allowing digital entries and real life builds, but everyone is limited to one entry only to keep things fair. We will have three prizes available:
- Top staff pick of the real-life entries
- Runner up real-life entry
- Top staff pick of the digital entries
We want to focus on and inspire some real building here, so this explains why more prizes are available for the real-life entries. Prizes will be revealed in an upcoming article.
Different from the previous year, we want to encourage you to show off your WIPs this year as well, to make OcTRAINber really a month that is all about trains within the Lego community. Therefore, extra credit will be given to the best WIP stories and/or pictures during the event. Specific information about WIP points will be mentioned in an upcoming article.
We will pick the winners after we have announced the official close of the competition and have stopped accepting new entries, which will be some time after November 1. Once the judges have come to a sound conclusion regarding the winners, we will post one final article announcing them, and then we will be in contact with those winners regarding their prizes.
Judges will also be announced in an upcoming article.
Thanks for reading, and now it’s time for some building! Again, we will only accept entries after midnight on October 1. Until then, start planning! We are seriously looking forward to this competition, especially after how much fun last year was. If there are any questions, please feel free to ask us; we are more than happy to provide clarification.
Happy building!
We are limiting entries to those based in reality. I.E., an entry should be a model of a prototype. The reason for this is, and @raised put it, is that otherwise it would break the idea of the challenge being “out of your comfort zone.”
Can “foreign” include a reimagining or reinterpretation of an existing or retired Lego set? For example, if I wanted to enter an 8 wide version of the maersk train?
Reimagation of a Lego set could work, but only if it connects with a prototype, like for example how the Maersk locomotive was reimagined by Ralph Savelsberg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/albums/72157626826152686). Reimaging a set like 4564 would only work if you manage to combine it with a real life propotype like the MaK DE 6400 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Class_6400). I hope you get the point!
Funny you should mention 4564, that was what I actually wanted 😉
Btw, I think there’s a mistake in the last line of the post, you say you’ll accept entries till October 1st, shouldn’t it be November 1st?
It says we’re only accepting entries after that date 🙂
Yep, I realized that later. Nevermind, silly me.
I have a couple questions.
1: does something from Star Wars such as the rail crawler count as foreign?
2: is this limited to just Lego or can I mix in parts from mega blocks/ other brands of bricks?
To answer your questions:
1. Unfortunately no, prototypes set in fictional universes aren’t allowed to be entered. As said: We are limiting entries to those based in reality. I.E., an entry should be a model of a prototype. The reason for this is, is that otherwise it would break the idea of the challenge being “out of your comfort zone.”
2. You can add third party items like a PFx Brick or Big Ben Bricks wheels, but no direct Lego competitors (ie. Megablocks and other clones).
Regarding digital entries: are we limited to those colors that a specific part is available in today, or do we have room for creativity?
The advantage of digital is that you remove those real-life limitations. I say go for it! Use whatever you want.