Last year I was invited to join a group of friends from the LEGO train community in a Secret Santa Gift Exchange. If you’ve never participated in one, a Secret Santa is a Christmas tradition in which members of a group or community are randomly assigned a person to whom they give a gift. The identity of the gift giver is to remain a secret and should not be revealed until the gifts are opened.

Since all of us in the group are LEGO train builders, for this gift exchange we decided to exchange rail cars. The cars that came out of this exchange were awesome and the whole event was an unbelievably fun experience! It was such a success that we decided to do it again for 2021, and the gift opening date is only a few days away.

But for now we would like to look back on the cars from the 2020 exchange. So for the next few days, we’ll be sharing those builds with you and giving a bit of background on them, Who built them, who received them, and why the designer chose the car they modeled.

But first, let’s set things up on how the exchange was organized. The rules for the gifts were as follows.

1. Freight cars only.
2. Must be about 1:48 scale (8 wide)
3. The price of the gift should be between $75 and $100 (US Dollars)
4. Must use roller bearings (these dont count towards the $100)
5. No recolors of available kits. Each gift will be a unique MOC from each builder.

In addition, each builder could suggest the era, and railroad of the car they would receive if desired.

Brick Model Railroader and Brick Train Depot split donating ball bearing wheel sets to all participants for their builds, and OKBrickworks printed all the decals used for the cars.

The list of participants included.

1. Cameron Miller
2. Jeffry Fonda
3. Monty Smith
4. Scott Roys
5. Trevor Parker
6. Cale Leiphart
7. Matt Csenge
8. Bradley Klouzek
9. Scott Hoffmeyer
10. Mike Bradley

Planing and prep for the exchange started mid June of 2020 in order to give all builders ample time to build their cars and ship them to the recipient. Since we were spread out across the United States and couldn’t gather together for the exchange, all gifts were shipped to their new owners, and a group video call was set up for everyone to attend and have the big unwrapping and reveal of the cars.

And now it’s time to take a look at the cars. This is just the first part, we’ll be showing off more of the cars in the next few days, so keep checking back. And now here are the first two cars from the 2020 Rail Car Secret Santa.

Santa Fe Caboose: Monty’s Build for Cameron

Monty Smith, of Monty’s Trains fame, drew Cameron Miller’s name to build a car for. Monty chose to build a classic Santa Fe CE-1 class caboose and the result was a wonderfully iconic car with some great looks and details including a full interior.

Here is what Monty had to say about the car he designed and built.

The person I was building for (Cam) said that they’d like “anything post 1910 from any southwestern road.” After several days of pondering and browsing, I settled on a Santa Fe caboose. Part of my philosophy of gift-giving is to give a gift that is useful, and I figured a caboose is a must-have on any train! Because I know Cam owns a wide variety of rolling stock, I chose a caboose that was built in the 1920s but rebuilt in the 1970s, combining features from both eras for maximum versatility.

The design phase was swift, as I’ve built many a caboose before. I built the end steps attached to the trucks so they can swivel freely to handle tight turns, kept the walkway on the roof and kept the roof round even though the rebuilds tended to have an angled roof installed, and built the yellow stripe into the body to accompany the vinyl sticker of the Santa Fe logo. Easy so far! The real challenge came when it was time to order parts. I have a VERY well-stocked LEGO workshop at home, so I’m used to using whatever parts are on-hand and only needing to order more when I run out of something. Even then, once the parts come in, I can pick up where I left off with the build. In this case, I had to completely finish the build (many stand-in colors were used in this process) so I would know exactly what bricks I needed to order. In retrospect, I should have taken some pictures of the draft model before I disassembled it to count out all the pieces. Once the bricks arrived, I couldn’t remember exactly how I had built the thing! I also found that I miscounted, and left a couple of pieces out of the orders by mistake. If I wasn’t a procrastinator, this wouldn’t be an issue, but because I AM a procrastinator, it meant using a couple of not-so-new bricks from my personal collection to get the completed model out the door. Staying within budget was also a bit of a headache. I very specifically do NOT keep track of how much I spend on this hobby because I’m afraid of the answer, and suddenly I had to know EXACTLY how much I spent on the parts for this build! Aiming for the assigned budget was very tricky, as prices on new bricks can vary tremendously. Also had a small issue with a couple of the stickers not being quite the right size, but that can easily be fixed later on.

Overall, despite the challenges, I highly enjoyed this exercise and look forward to participating next year!    

Bradly’s car for Scott Roys: Rio Grande Mini Cube Boxcar

Bradley pulled Scott Roys’ name to build a car for. Bradley’s choice of car was the unique 40ft High Cube boxcar built by the Pullman Co. and lettered for the Rio Grande.

Here is more info from Bradley on the car he designed.

Hey all! Bradley here with my Secret Santa. My person was Scott Roys, who’s favorite road was Denver Rio Grande & Western with a modelling era of the 1930’s to 1960’s. This was personally a challenge for me, because I really haven’t explored different road names outside of Frisco and BN, so I had to take a dig into the history of the DRG&W in order to find the prototype I’ll use. They had a wide range of rolling stock from cattle cars, flat cars, to short hi-cubes and everything in-between. I built out several prototypes before settling on the 40 ft. hi-cube. Some of them were too expensive, such as a wooden refrigerator car, and some of them were too small and in-expensive, like an open-ended gondola.

I settled on the “baby-cube” 40 ft. hi-cube due to the fact that it was something I haven’t really seen modelled before in LEGO. I’ve seen plenty of long 60 ft. hi-cubes, but not a short and stubby 40 ft. one. Built in 1967 by Pullman, this PS-1 boxcar belonged to a small series of four cars. It featured a 4,900 cubic foot capacity. It was exclusively used to transport new consumer appliances manufactured by the Whirlpool Company in Indiana.

Clocking in at around 862 pages and with a lot of reddish-brown pieces, I bring you the D&RGW 40 ft hi-cube. One thing you may notice is the use of the ingot bars for the sides and on the roof of the model. I tried to use this piece as much as I can as it helps give off that “ribbed” look the sides and roof had.

The roof was the trickiest part to design as that is part of the model that most people will see, along with the sides. There weren’t any solid photos of the prototypes, so I had to make do with what I had. , as I was able to achieve giving the top ribs a half-plate height in order to help give it an offset that wouldn’t look right if it was a full plate. Overall I am very, very pleased on how this turned out, with its simplistic look but intricate details used to help bring this model to life.

Part 2 Coming Tomorrow

And that’s it for part 1. Monty and Bradley designed some pretty nice cars for their gifts. We still have 8 more cars to show off though. Look for part 2 coming tomorrow.