Most of the time, pictures say more than a thousand words. Today’s model proves this point, even though they are renders. Anyways, John O’Shea, known for his amazing US and EU style trucks, build a small Komatsu Road/Rail Digger for an upcoming bigger build. Don’t try to build this beast at home without at least painting several parts, but hey, that’s one of the premiums of Digital Builds.
According to John, these renders are done with Blender, a piece of open source render software and the Mecabricks plugin. I know both and I have definitely never used them before, but if you guys want to give it a try, you now know what kind of amazing photo-realistic pictures you can make with it!
In the last 5 years, me and BigDaedy have been desiging our own takes on the Bombardier Traxx in 1:45 scale. The Traxx runs both in the Netherlands and in Germany, and is, together with the Siemens Vectron, one of the two truely “European” Electrics out there at the moment. While we had very different starting points, we more and more converged to a same type of design, but we’ll get back to that in a future post. Since both of us have just finished our respective versions, we thought it would be nice to present them together in one post.
Introduction: The Traxx
The Bombardier Traxx is the current workhorse on most of the Cargo trains in Europe, but next to that, it also has seen a fair share of use in passenger trains. In the Netherlands the High Speed Line – Zuid between Amsterdam Schiphol, Rotterdam and Breda is their main operating ground, but there are also several private freightcompanies that run Traxx’es. In Germany almost every Rail Cargo company uses Traxx’es, plus several of the big passenger train companies like Deutsche Bahn and Metronom.
Motorization
Between our two models there are some very big similarities, which (most of the time) are intentional since we worked very closely together on this design, sharing WIP pictures quite often. Some differences are the vents on the side of the roof, the pantographs, the sidepanels and a different motorization option. Whereas I (raised) chose to go all-in with two 1:2 geared PF L-motors for extra speed, a PFx Brick (with the potential to include lights) and an additional XL Speaker for sound, all build in, BigDaedy chose the always reliable 9V motor. Who says Modern European Elecitrics can’t have some heritiage in them? (In all fairness, with the future arrival of FX Track, a hybrid of both might not even such a bad idea to begin with…)
On December 30th, the team at LDraw.org released the newest parts update, 2017-01. According to the website, the new release adds 717 new files to the library, which includes 509 new parts and 33 new primitives. There are also updates to the configuration files for colors.
For those not familiar with LDraw, it is an open standard for defining parts used by a number of LEGO CAD programs. The open nature of the standard allows for numerous parts authors, including those who model 3rd party parts such as Big Ben Bricks wheels. Parts are reviewed before release to ensure compatibility with the standard and conformance to the actual part. CAD programs using the LDraw format are used by many modelers to create virtual MOCs and instruction sets. Having been around for over a decade, the LDraw library contains many parts not found other virtual building platforms, including parts that have been long retired, but that may be available to builders via BrickLink or other 3rd party sources.
Check out the LDraw.org website for more information, and enjoy the New Year!
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