PennLUG, and Brick Model Railroader visited the World’s Greatest Hobby on Tour’s first stop of 2018 this past weekend in Monroeville, just outside of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Both myself and Glenn Holland were filling dual roles supporting our club, PennLUG’s, LEGO® train layout, and representing BMR at it’s first show in 2018.
Our fourth premium instructions, for the AAR 53′ 70 Ton Flat Car are now available for purchase in our store!
Continue reading Our AAR 53′ 70 Ton Flat Car Premium Instructions are now on sale, plus Restocks!
In the brick-built train hobby, one of the often asked questions revolves around how or where to create custom decals for decorating our models with our favorite railroad liveries. Many options exist, including using traditional O scale decals, printing your own on decal paper using a home ink-jet printer, or, like we do for the BMR Premium Instruction sets, use a 3rd party printer like OKBrickWorks.
One difficulty that I’ve had over the years is finding proper decals with white lettering for the cars that I build. I’m a fan of the fallen-flag Rutland Railroad, which operated in Vermont and New York until the early 1960s. Many of their cars, and almost all of their steam locomotives, were lettered in silver or white paint on black backgrounds. While modeling decals for the locomotives are commercially available in compatible sizes for my LEGO trains, I’ve always had trouble finding decent freight car decals.
A few weeks ago, I came across the website StickyLife.com. StickyLife allows you to create a variety of customized items, including bumper stickers, magnets, and vinyl decals. Originally I had thought to use the site to create lettering for my 1:8 scale Live Steam flatcar, but then I wondered if it would be possible to create decals for my LEGO cars as well.
The following is a walk through of the process, and a review of the final product.
Continue reading StickyLife – A Review
After a great and exciting month that we dubbed OcTRAINber, the difficult part for us judges had only just begon. However, we have managed to finally decide on the winners, which will be announced in this post!
First of all, let us say that we are pleasantly surprised by all the high quality entries and the great Swoosh-videos. We were very glad to see so many great ideas and prototypes being build, both digital and in real life. In fact, the reason that it took us so long to judge is because of the high quality of all of the entries. Therefore, we would like to thank all our contestants, because without you, OcTRAINber wouldn’t have been the succes it has been!
Now, let’s move on to the award ceremony!
Continue reading OcTRAINber: The Results
If you you’ve been following the LEGO Train Fan Club Facebook group recently you probably have seen the ongoing discussion on Mike Moon’s 3D printed car bodies for LEGO trains. If you haven’t, take a read through here.
Mike’s original post presented his 3D printed trolley car body designed to fit on a LEGO brick built train base. It has since ignited a discussion about what is and is not a LEGO train, and what techniques are acceptable to the community and what ones are a step too far.
Continue reading When is a LEGO® Train Not A LEGO® Train Anymore?
My first encounter with the Blue Comet was at the National Toy Train Museum in Strasburg Pennsylvania. It was an O scale model of the train made by MTH, sitting on a display shelf in the main display room. I fell in love with the train almost immediately. It was a very striking train, with the locomotive painted in an eye catching blue with gold pin striping, and nickel plated accents. The passenger cars also blue, with an attractive band of white running down the windows. It was beautiful train from a different time, a time when rail travel was king, and a journey on a train was something special. The Blue Comet had caught my imagination like so many before. I knew that I was going to be the one to bring this train to life again in LEGO.
“A Deluxe Class Train, for a Coach Class Fare”
Continue reading A Tail Of The Blue Comet: The Seashore’s Finest Train In LEGO by Cale Leiphart
Today we’re looking at something with a high cool factor.
Meet Falk Schulz, or “bricknerd” on Flickr, a very talented builder from Germany. He’s certainly no stranger to Brick Model Railroader, having been featured in a past article highlighting some his Prussian electric models. Falk is known for his amazing work with diesel locomotives, having built several North American models. My favorite is probably his Rio Grande SD 40T-2.
However, as can be seen by the title, we’re not focusing on his diesels today. Instead, we’re looking at a steam locomotive. A small one, too.
Continue reading Building Up Prussian Steam
BrickFair Virginia 2017 was the last of the big AFOL convention I was planing to attend this year. Taking place last weekend, August 2nd to 6th, it was an awesome event filled with trains and fun. Though BrickFair may sometimes seem a little less prestigious compared to Brickworld when it comes to LEGO trains, BrickFair can no doubt draw a wonderful and diverse train presence with no less than seven clubs displaying train and monorail layouts, as well as numerous models from individual builders. BrickFair was also host to a Train Olympics competition, run by Adny Mollmann and Nick O’Donell from OKILUG. And there were a few fan voted trains awards given out too. So let’s recap the fun.
Continue reading BrickFair Virginia 2017
I love coming across new (or maybe just new to me) train builders when perusing through flickr, or one of the other LEGO® train hangouts online. Especially when their models are as good as these two by Aaron Burnett.
Continue reading Classics of Modern Railroading
With Elroy’s articles on Matson’s Landing, and the A/D Track concept, as well as the the Track Geometry article, it seems we have a bit of a theme running right now with train layout design. I too am working on some layout planning, but unlike Elroy’s smaller, personal layout, I’m working on layout designs for my club, PennLUG. And since this is a different kind of beast from a home layout, I thought it would be great to illustrate all the planing that goes into a train layout like ours.
Some of you may be familiar with PennLUG’s style of LEGO® train layouts. But for the benefit of those new to us, I will give a bit of background. Continue reading The PennLUG Lines: Planning a LEGO Train, Club Layout
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