Hello again to all of our awesome fans and supporters!

Christmas and the holidays are now past us and we find ourselves looking ahead to 2018. We have just a few things we wanted to cover in this article, which will likely be the last general article of the year. We have a year-in-review planned to go up soon, so be sure to check in later for that article.

Brick Model Railroader Is Going To The Train Show

First off, we’d like to announce that Brick Model Railroader will be present at the World’s Greatest Hobby on Tour train show in Monroeville, Pennsylvania on January 6th and 7th. We’ll be there as part of the PennLUG layout once again (Cale and Glenn are in PennLUG).

Worlds Greatest Hobby on Tour Monroeville PA

Instructions For Sale

Next, some information about our premium instructions.  We still have some premium instructions available fore the USRA 55 ton hopper and AAR 53′ flat car ad D4 crawler. You can find these available in our online store.

BMR Store

We have had a resounding success with our first four kits, and we plan to continue offering more in the near future. However, we can’t keep producing the same four kits forever. We need to make room for more new stuff, so here’s our plan:

We’ll be offering all our our first four premium instructions for a limited time. They will be available as pre-order only, meaning that we will fill as many orders as we get. After the order period, we won’t be making any more. We’ll announce the pre-order dates at a later time.

We’re Finally Making A Caboose

We’re also planning ahead for our fifth premium instruction kit, which will be the North Eastern caboose. We’ve had a lot of requests for a caboose for some design, so we’ve finally decided to answer those prayers! One of the problems we ran into is that a lot of caboose designs are specific to one or a small handful of railroads. We chose the north eastern caboose because it spanned dozens of railroads in the United States, and this will allow us to produce several decals to be used with the kit. We’ll have more information on the north eastern caboose later.

PDF?

We’ve also been getting more questions about selling PDF copies  of our premium instructions. We have deliberately decided NOT to sell PDF versions. There are a couple reasons for this:

• It would not be fair to those who have already purchased the premium instructions of that car.
• PDFs are easier to duplicate or resell.
• There is no convenient way to package the wheel sets separately.
• When we decided to start selling instructions, we wanted them to be a premium product. We wanted them to be special and to feel like you got something of value. You just can’t beat a physical product for that. We want you to be able to pull our Instructions off the book shelf long after you’ve built the model and still find them worthwhile

Our First Locomotive Kit

We’ve also been making serious progress with our locomotive. On December 28, we (Cale and Glenn) had one of our last major work sessions on the locomotive, and we seem to have solved every operational issue that we’ve come across. Our drive train is robust and reliable, and the rods move properly. Seeing the model run circles around the living room floor was amazing!

We’ve also confirmed that it WILL negotiate R40 curves if the tender drawbar is extended by one stud. This is a concession we had to make, but we had to make the locomotive work on R40s. It’s the principle of the thing. HOWEVER, the locomotive cannot navigate through a standard LEGO turnout (switch). This is pretty unfortunate, but it’s an unfortunate reality. It should also be made clear that this is not a problem with the locomotive, but rather a problem with the design of the switch. The flanges of the driver will always ride ps on part of the rails and derail the locomotive. But seriously, who cares about standard switches anymore?

Regardless, we’ve been quite happy with the locomotive thus far. We’re still hoping to announce the locomotive in January 2018 with an announcement of our sale plan following that.

So that’s all we have this week. Look for our 1 year Anniversary Article soon. And thank you for supporting us. We love this LEGO Train Hobby, and we love sharing it with you.

The BMR Team