Traditional Model Railroading has been called by some the “World’s Greatest Hobby” – and not necessarily out of the normal sort of pride that one tends to have towards their passions. Model Railroading encompasses a very large amount of skills and interests, even beyond just scale modeling – electrical work, carpentry, machining and fabrication, paint, plastic and foam sculpting, and more. A lot has been done in the hobby to help make it easier to get into and make some truly impressive things without requiring an in-depth knowledge or steep learning curve to be learned by a single person, but it can still be very daunting for a person to pick up once they start looking into everything involved.

LEGO Model Railroading is similar to this in a lot of ways. Beyond just building a model that looks good, if you want to design and run a LEGO locomotive you will need to learn a lot more than just good building practices. There’s some dabbling in Technic, learning about gearing, learning about articulation and swing clearances – and that’s just for the locomotives! The amount of topics to learn grows greatly as you expand into a full layout.

People looking to get into LEGO Trains as a modeling hobby have a bit more of a challenge than they would going into something like HO or O Scale stuff – you have to build everything yourself, and LEGO doesn’t sell true Scale model kits. This leaves a bit of a gap for where to start – how can someone just coming in get to a point where they can have and run models that look as good as the custom stuff that caught their eye? This generally seems to be the point where people realize that there is a lot more to learn than there seemed.

Of course, there are always options outside of the LEGO company. There are a lot of great builders in the train community who have been sharing huge amounts of resources and information for years. Custom instructions for LEGO Trains and train-related models are becoming easier to find and many very-high quality ones are available as well, which can also help more with teaching techniques and getting people started with nice detailed models. 

Even with these available, there’s always going to be the desire to do something yourself. Maybe what you want isn’t available, maybe you just want to have the satisfaction or the skills to be able to do something like that on your own – and of course, there’s also those who love to learn new things for its own sake.

To help with this, I’d like to do a series covering how to build Scale Model LEGO trains – just the good, fundamental basics. A lot of this information may be common knowledge to more experienced builders, but my hope is to create a good starting point for new people coming into the hobby. By taking the many stages of good design in small, focused chunks we can examine each stage and learn some good practices and methods for dealing with the different phases of the design process. These are good starting points, but they are not necessarily definitive or even the best way to do it – They should let you get some good starting fundamentals. When building a model from instructions or mimicking techniques from more experienced builders, it can be relatively simple to see how something was built, but it’s good to know why it was done that way. Learning the fundamentals behind each of the design choices is a great way to get started towards great models.

That said, let’s cover the first, most fundamental topic of Scale Modeling.