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.
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.
