Inspiration, LEGO Train News, Model Design, Products

LEGO TRAIN PROJECTS book review.

September 18, 2020 Enrico Lussi Leave a comment

Recently author Charles Pritchett has released a LEGO train project book with 7 unique designs for LEGO trains. This article is a review about the book and the 7 designs which are included.

The Author

First about the author, Charles Pritchett has been building with LEGO for 35 years. He is also a professional graphic, UI, and UX designer. He has authored or co-authored several LEGO books, including Prehistoric Bricks: Building LEGO Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Beasts; Building LEGO BrickHeadz: Heroes; Building LEGO BrickHeadz: Villains; and Expanding the LEGO Winter Village. All these books ,including the Train Projects, are available on Amazon. The introduction paragraph gives an interesting back story on how Charles started with LEGO and how he came back from his dark ages.

After the introduction, the book starts off with an explanation on how the book is laid out and where you can gather parts for the designs which are featured in the book. It also gives a link the useful XML files to use if you want to upload the designs to Bricklink. This paragraph is useful for first time builders or builders who just came back out of the dark ages. However, for the more experience builders this paragraph is a bit useless and will be skipped.

The Designs

The book features 7 designs: a coal gondola, a milk tanker, an open hopper, a depressed flatcar with electrical load, a passenger coach, a powered box car and a locomotive. The designs themselves are featured in a way that is visually interesting. The instructions and the parts list are clear, simple, and easy to use. All designs, except the locomotive, also have a couple of alternative color scheme featured, which shows the design in an alternate version and can be a cool change if you’re building multiple of the same design.

All the designs are 6-wide builds and more in a City train style. They are all neat and cool designs and go perfectly with the standard Lego train city sets. But, for a more experienced builder, they are all more simple. \

Is this a bad thing? It depends. If you already have the City trains in your collection and want to expand them with a couple of interesting builds, these designs will then be perfect for you! If you’re an experienced builder and have been building MOCs for a while, then these will not really speak to you as a builder. For 6-wide builders in general the book shows how you can build interesting designs in a 6-wide space.

For the designs themselves, I haven’t got that many things to point out/say. There all interesting if you’re a 6-wide builder and if you built in the city train scale/theme. There all pretty good looking and straight forward and haven’t got anything really important to mention, except for the locomotive.

The EMD FL9

The locomotive is the final design featured in the book and is the most complicated/biggest built in the book., and is in my opinion the best looking. The design is an interesting one with a great shape and colour scheme. It’s an EMD FL9 diesel locomotive, sixty units were built between October 1956 and November 1960 by General Motors Electro-Motive Division for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (the “New Haven”). The locomotive is designed in the famous orange, white and black color scheme.

An Electro-Motive builder’s photo featuring freshly outshopped New Haven FL9 #2033 circa 1960.(source: american-rails.com)

Like mentioned above the locomotive is really good looking especially for a 6-wide model. The way the orange and white cross each other is achieved with a really intricated building technique using cheese slopes. The locomotive has got a lot of detailing on all sides to give it a really realistic look.

So, the design is good looking, but there is a small problem. The locomotive isn’t powered. For the motorization the locomotive can use the Powered Box Car featured in the book. I find this disappointing. First of all, I personally prefer if a locomotive can power itself along the tracks secondly if you look at the design featured in the book, it can easily be powered with Power Functions, 9V or Powered Up. I’m personally really disappointed that the locomotive design isn’t powered, and it feels a bit like a missed opportunity.

In Conclusion

In my opnion, this book is just about worth the 15 dollars/euro/pounds. It’s a instruction book which shows 7 pretty interesting design and that’s about it. I was hoping for a bit more background information about LEGO trains, and maybe a bit more history. There are already so many great and interesting LEGO train books out there. I feel it’s really a missed opportunity. It doesn’t even point out which power systems LEGO has made to be able to power your train.

In short, I recommend the book for 6-wide builders who want to expand their collection or want a couple of interesting designs to use as inspiration. For more experienced builders, this book hasn’t got that many things to offer. It is, however, interesting to read trough the instructions to get a general idea how the designs work and what you can achieve with a 6-wide build.

If your looking for a book that has got it all. Check out Holger Matthes his book. It’s a bit more expensive but has it all. From LEGO train history and power systems, to help and instructions for beginners and amazing builds for experience builders. Holger has written the book in a very calm and enjoyable writing style, which can make difficult and complex topics easy to read. The book contains a lot of interesting background story behind a couple of his most complicated builds.

The LEGO TRAINS BOOK from Holger Matthes

Contests, Layout Design, Layouts, People

OcTRAINber 2020: Podcast, Judge & Clarifying the Rules

September 5, 2020 raised Leave a comment

Since announcing OcTRAINber 2020: Dioramas, dioramas everywhere, we have seen a lot of enthousiast reactions, which we are very glad about. This post is the first follow-up post, and several more will most probably follow in the coming weeks, to keep the well-known Hype Train going.

Podcast

As part of this years Challenge we will host a BMR Podcast this Sunday over at Youtube, be sure to check it out!

The Fourth Judge

As has become tradition, OcTRAINber is judged by a panel of three BMR Judges, combined with one Guest Judge. Just like last year the BMR Judges will be Cale Leiphart, Glenn Holland and yours truely.

Our Guest Judge this year will be Falk, who is better known as Bricknerd over at Flickr. Falk is very skilled in building little dioramas that – if his train designs weren’t so awesome – would surely stand out in any build!

Clarifying the Rules

We also however received some requests for clarification on the rules, which we would like to give.

First of all, let us say one thing: For the last three years OcTRAINber has been a building challenge that both challenges and brings out the creativity. For this reason we on purpose stay vague on the rules, because we like to see exactly that creativity.

1. Diorama?

The first question was about what a diorama actually is. It’s always a bit shady difference between the two, but with layout it at least implies that some form of operations is possible, whereas a diorama can be totally static. However, as is the case with most layouts; if you just take a part of it, it becomes a diorama quite fast.

Google has the following definition: “a model representing a scene with three-dimensional figures, either in miniature or as a large-scale museum exhibit.”

The emphasis here lays on the scene part. Other than a layout, a diorama is a scene that tells some form of story. That story can something big like a train robbery, but can also just be a field of green with cows. Just as long it’s a scene, it’s fine.

2. Train & track?

In the rules it is stipulated that every diorama needs to have some form of train and track. This being a Brick Model Railroader hosted Building Challenge this is kind of a must-have. However, different than the last three installments of OcTRAINber, the train & track don’t have to take center stage this time around.

That means that for the first time in the history of OcTRAINber, you are allowed to enter a Lego train set, a MOD or any other Instructions-based third party design. However, the choice to do so has to be an integral part of the diorama. This means that instead of judging the trains for their build, taking a look at them and how/if they fit or enhance the scene will be how they are viewed.

Just for an example, take this motorized diorama by bogieman that has a minifig loading crates into a boxcar designed by Jeffrey Fonda over at BTD. That’s a build where one would say having the train there is essential to the story of the scene, and that level of integration will be scored higher for tying it all together.

3. Movement?

Last year OcTRAINber had the “Technic Challenge” theme, where it was all about movement. Even though this year is about dioramas, the whole ‘scene’ thing that is part of a diorama does mean that if some movement is ‘necessary’ for the scene, it is for sure allowed.

4. Procedural Building?

As we found out in last years survey, a lot of builders were not able send in their Entries because for the first time we lacked a Digital Builds-category. Here at BMR we are very much in favour of IRL builds, because that’s in the end the best way to grow our hobby: To show those trains and let them run! However, we understand that not everybody is able to have huge piles of Legos laying around, let alone have the space for a full Diorama. Therefore, we have decided to allow Digital Builds this year again.

We know there are some things happening in the Digital World with Procedural Builds, which means you could technically build amazing pieces of nature with just one click. However, because a diorama is so much more than some pieces of rock, we don’t see a bit problem in this. We will however keep an eye out on this, so that it won’t take over the creativity (and fun) of this building challenge.

5. Size?

Some clarifications on size, which we also kind of discussed in the OcTRAINber BMR Podcast and on the BMR Flickr:

1) Builders are not restricted to 32×32 baseplates but can create any form of base that they like in any size or shape using any LEGO parts they see fit.

2) Size will be determined by the number of studs and how it equates to a 32×32 baseplate.

3) The minimum size for a diorama is 1024 studs, equivalent to a single 32×32 baseplate.

4) The cut-off point for each category is 1 stud less than the start of the next category. So, for example, Small is 1024 to 3071 studs (the equivalent of three 32×32 baseplates minus 1 stud), Large is 3072 to 6141 studs and Huge is 6142 studs and over.

(kudos to HodCarrier for the great summary)

(if more questions will come in, we will add them to this post)

LEGO® News

OcTRAINber 2020 – Dioramas, dioramas everywhere!

September 1, 2020 raised 2 Comments

Due to COVID-19 a lot is different this year. However, we didn’t want the community to miss this years OcTRAINber due to that. So, we decided that for the fourth year in a row, OcTRAINber will go on!

This years theme will be “Dioramas, Dioramas Everywhere”. Like the previous installments of OcTRAINber, the idea of this building challenge is to actually challenge builders. To get us out of our comfort zones. We Trainheads build a lot of trains, but we tend to put less emphasis on the stuff that goes next to a train, the stuff that really makes or breaks a picture. And, we must admit, most of us at BMR do exactly the same. In fact, almost all of my pictures are just trains with a white background… So, we decided that building train themed dioramas should be the ideal theme for this years OcTRAINber.

After last years OcTRAINber (The Technic Challenge) we did a little evaluation to find out what things we could improve upon. Two really stood out: The re-introduction of a Digital Builds category, and an extended timeframe to plan and build. And since you, the community, make OcTRAINber, we decided to go with both.

So yes, that means OcTRAINber officially starts today!

The idea is simple, from today onwards you as a community have one month of pre-building in which you can already do your planning, post your WIP stories or just start hyping yourself up. Everything is allowed to do already as if it would be last years OcTRAINber, with one small difference: The Entries page will only go live on October 1st.

Rules

Just so you have some guidelines on what to build, we have made a set of rules that should be enough to get you building. The first two rules are a bit different from previous years, where we had some really though rules about what qualified as an Entry. This gives builders more flexibility, hopefully you will also be able to apply this!

We will keep the idea of what a “diorama” is on purpose as vague as possible. Just go all-out with your creativity.
Every diorama must have some form of track, and some form of a train. It’s an Bulding Challenge hosted by Brick Model Railroader after all. Just go all-out with your creativity here as well.
Entries must be original models. No stealing. This also means no MODs (thus also no sets), only MOCs.
Third party parts are allowed, clone bricks aren’t. We know this can be a thin line, just walk it wisely.
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 August 1st 2020 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. 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! These threads will open on October 1st.
We will be accepting entries from Midnight on October 1st to Midnight on November 1st (meaning October 31st, at 23:59 PDT). There is possibility of a grace period to ensure those that need that one final Bricklink order have a fair chance.
NOTE: If this is the case, please let us know at least one week (ie. 7 days) before October 31st, so that everybody has a fair chance to use this extension.

Points

Points will be awarded in three categories: Credibility, WIP Story and Diorama Factor

First of all, credibility of the prototype. This means we will be looking at how much the build represents the real life prototype. Both the diorama itself, but definatly also the train that is on it. If you are sending in a fantasy model, we will look at how credible the build is; would it fit in, does the backstory make sense?

Second of all, the WIP story. This refers to both showing off your building process, but also to how and why you decided to model a certain prototype. The better the story and the more updates you give and the more elaborate your building story is, the better.

Third and last, the Diorama Factor. This is all about how you build your diorama. is it extra funky, does it have strange connections, is everything build on it’s side, is everything off grid… The more creative, the better, but as always with OcTRAINber, it’s about quality first, and quantity second.

Prizes & Winners

We haven’t finalized on prizes yet, but since this is a building challenge, we will for sure have some, just like in previous years.

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 (who, just like last year, will be announced in an upcoming article) 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.

Final Words

So, that’s it for now. OcTRAINber has officially started, even though it’s just September. Now the only thing you have to do is start building, and show those diorama’s everywhere! Happy OcTRAINber!