Varda Elentári Furrer recently shared a fun video of their LEGO garden railway on Facebook. A camera was placed in front of the train to give us an incredible view from the engineer’s seat.
They layout is expansive and packed full of incredible detail. Varda’s excellent models include railcars, bridges, buildings, signals, and more. Everything is expertly crafted in a scale which appears to be close to G-scale.
While Varda’s MOCs are beautiful, the natural landscaping brings this layout to another level. If we didn’t know any better, we would guess Varda must be one of the gardeners at LEGOland. It really looks that good.
I agree, this topic title normally makes more sense over at our friends of The Lego Car Blog but thanks to well-know Sci-Fi trains and space builder Sunder, we can now also use this title over at BMR, and not without a reason. Just have a look at this great YouTube video and you know what I mean!
I’m to be honest not sure what is more addictive; that song or seeing 3 minutes of drifting by a Lego Train…
As you can see, Sunder is a great builder who also knows his ways in 3D rendering, which actually gives us the excuse to also feature another of his models which he posted about a week ago. Just have a look and decide for yourself if this is actually a render, or real life bricks…
We posted these few photos on the BMR Facebook and Instagram pages on Sunday, and I felt they’d be fitting to throw in this article.
For those that don’t already know, Brick Model Railroader came into existence after the previous Lego train community hub, the online publication RAILBRICKS, fell apart. Many of the contributors and staff members got busy with other aspects of their lives, and so could not channel energy into RAILBRICKS.
The creator and original editor of RAILBRICKS is a gentleman by the name of Jeramy Spurgeon. Before stepping down from the Editor position, he managed to sell a couple limited edition kits. Both of these kits are 6 stud wide models but are still packed with detail.
After Glenn Holland showed the types of curved tracks that are currently available on the aftermarket and what can be expected, I thought it could be interesting as well to tell about the ways how to make your own track. Some if it is from before the ME Models era, some of it actually is a bit younger.
In any way, it shows our community is far more versatile and creative than one might sometimes think, even back in the days when the 9V system limited us to 1 radius, 1 type of switch and 1 type of straights.
Seeing how much there is out there nowadays, I’m sure this is not an exhaustive list. So, if you have any additions, feel free to add them in the comments.
2 weeks ago I wrote about the Barriger Library and the wonderful historical resource it provides for North American railroading. Today I want to point out another great flickr library that myself and several of my fellow LEGO train builders have been drawing inspiration from. The JJ Young, Jr Library.
Last time, I spoke about how to start modeling a typical European style goods railcar. I have been speaking at length about all kind of fancy ways of making sure you understand your prototype. I hope you have been making notes because today we will immediately dive into the fun part: Building! Let’s just take off where we left now, shall we?
Step 4. Choosing your materials
After the scale has been set, it’s time to decide which part will be essential for your design. This might sound silly, but in my opinion every train model has 1 defining part (or technique, meaning several parts combined) around which the whole model is being build. In this case, I settled on the Lego Chair in brown, since I had a lot of them and wanted to get rid of them without selling. Also, the idea was that brown would nicely mimick the rust on the prototype (And trust me, some of them were far worse off than the one you just saw). Turning them into a railcar seemed to be the right solution. It didn’t work out as planned however…
As I already said in an earlier post, I’m a big fan of railcars and I do believe they should get more attention. Locomotives are nice, but when they can’t haul a big rake of railcars, they just look silly, if you ask me. In the end, a locomotive is meant to pull railcars, not run around looking all nice and shiny.
However, I know it’s difficult to pull off a nice railcar, because in the end, they are all quite boring, definitely when it comes to goods railcars. By accident, I have been documenting my last railcar build pretty well, so I thought it could be interesting to share. This will be a three-parter with three easy topics: 1. The Prototype, 2. The Build and 3. The Bragging. However, let’s start at square one, OK?
Today I would like to draw some attention to one of the coolest Flickr accounts I’ve come across in some time. This one does not have any LEGO train content, but at it’s core, it is proving to be an incredible resource for modeling North American railroads.
This will be the first in a series of articles about my process of building a LEGO steam locomotive. I intend to cover a variety of topics in this series including research, the use of custom elements, aftermarket electrical devices, and building techniques. While I will focus on a specific locomotive project I am currently working on, this series will not include a full set of step-by-step instructions to that locomotive. My intention is to share some experiences and techniques that I hope people can apply to any steam locomotive project, and perhaps other types of LEGO models as well. At any rate, my designs are usually pretty fragile and don’t really lend themselves to redistribution via instructions. Instead, I will lay out my approach to building a steam locomotive and why I think it is effective. I hope that this will help people who are struggling with what I think is a particularly difficult type of model to build or, at least, be of some interest to the readers of this site.
After the previous post on Ararat 1972 and Cale’s piece on Brick Model Railroading as such, I think the pieces are now set for the next installment in the series of inspiring layouts: Corfe Castle Station by Carl Greatrix. Lately, Carl has been the guy who has brought you the Caterham Seven and a lot of the visuals in the recent Lego games, but next to this, he is also a real trainhead and a lover of Scale Modelling. With the Corfe Castle Station layout, he had decided to fuse both of these to create an unique layout.
Corfe Castle Station – the eye-catcher and starting point of the layoutThe (almost finished) layout at STEAM 2011
The first thing that you notice when looking at Corfe Castle Station is that it follows a typical “British” approach. At least, that’s how it looks like for me after having read so many British Model Railroading Magazines (like Railway Modeller) when I was young. This means that we are looking at two mainline tracks and a siding, with a station as the main visual element. In fact, it’s just a very big diorama. The layout is an oval of which more than half is the fiddle yard and thus not part of the diorama. So, just as with Ararat 1972, there is no large yard where you can show off your trains. However, it does have two continuous loops which are ideal to show of your trains in high speed!
Overview of the layout – Two ovals and a fiddle yard.
What sets this layout apart of most other Lego Railway layouts is the design choices he makes: instead of using studs everywhere, Carl uses Scale Modelling techniques for making roads, gravel and mountains. This means that not everything in this layout is made out of Lego! The effect works surprisingly well. Instead of looking like a layout made of Lego, this is a layout that uses Lego as one of its mediums.
An example of combining Lego with scale modeling techniques
It becomes even more interesting when inserting his trains. This is because Carl, unlike most Lego Train builders, tries to use as little selective compression as possible. The result are models that are so accurate, that they don’t even look out of place in an actual O-scale layout.
Carl’s trains in an O-scale layout. Not part of Corfe Castle, but too nice not to show.
As said, the layout not only uses Lego. Carl was nice enough to keep a diary over at Flickr in which he shows how he designed the whole layout. This gives us the great possibility to dive a bit deeper into the layout and the way how it’s build.
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