Tag Archives: podcast

BMR and Community Updates: May 2020

Hello again, LEGO train fans and Brick Model Railroader supporters! We’ve got some great new articles in the works for you, but today we wanted to update you on a few things going on here at Brick Model Railroader. Let’s dive in.

Train Community Roundtable

There will be a Train Community Roundtable for the Brickworld Virtual Event coming up this Saturday, May 16th. Brickworld Virtual features LEGO artists, engineers, and vendors showing their creations via Zoom meeting rooms.  A new twist to the Brickworld public shows will be a presentation room where you can learn from the experts. General details about the Brickworld Virtual Convention can be found on the Brickworld website below.

Brickworld Virtual May 16 Web Page

BMR has been invited to participate along with several other LEGO train community members. The Train Community Roundtable is scheduled for 1:00pm – 2:50pm Central Time. The tentative topic list is as follows.

1. Introduction – LEGO Train Roundtable.

  • –  Bringing the LEGO Train fan community together
  • –  Open conversation and sharing ideas

2. LEGO New Developments

  • –  Powered Up?
  • –  40th Anniversary Train Set
  • –  Ghost Train Express ( # 70424)
  1. Brick Model Railroader Updates
  2. Brick Track Updates
  3. Other Updates
  4. Show off your MOC’s!
  5. Open Forum – Train Talk!

Come join us for two hours of talking trains.

Brick Model Railroader Podcast

We recently posted an article announcing the Brick Model Railroader podcast, a short live-streamed discussion on various Lego and train topics. Our Pilot was hosted by Enrico, and all regular episodes will be hosted live on the Brick Model Railroader Youtube channel. Podcast episode announcements will be posted through our social media outlets a few days in advance.

While primarily hosted on Youtube so we can answer questions from viewers, our podcast episodes will also be shared to and available on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcast (pending approval) and iTunes. Just type “Brick Model Railroader” in any of those apps and you should be fine!

New Premium Instructions

The Gunderson 60′ Boxcar, ACF 1958 Cu. Ft. Covered Hopper, and Pacific Fruit Express Reefer.

The BMR model team has been hard at work designing new Premium Instruction Models. Three of which we will be releasing very soon.

Gunderson box cover

The Gunderson 60′ High Cube Plate F Boxcar is our first BMR model designed by Aaron Burnett and  is our most modern freight car to date.

The modern 100 ton, high-cube, 60’ boxcar has become ubiquitous in the modern rail scene. These cars are designed to carry a myriad of loads, from auto parts to forest products and are a fixture to any modern freight train.

ACF Covered Hopper box cover

The American Car & Foundry 70-Ton 1958 Cu. Ft. Covered Hopper is our first BMR model designed by Matt Csenge.

American Car & Foundry recognized the need for a mass-produced covered hopper car to transport goods and bulk flowable commodities that needed protection from the weather. In 1936 ACF began building this 70-Ton 1958 cu. ft. capacity covered hopper for task. The cars quickly gained wide-spread appeal, with 59 railroads and 16 private and leasing companies purchasing them throughout their lifetime. Many of these car lasted well into the 1970’s, some even into the 1980’s in revenue service. Some of these cars are even still used today in maintenance-of-way service.

Pacific Fruit Express Reefer box cover.

Designed by Cale Leiphart, The Pacific Fruit Express R-30-9 and R-40-9 Reefer is a classic wood reefer from the golden age of ice cooled railroad refrigerator cars.

In 1936, Pacific Fruit Express began a program to recondition a large part of its aging wood refrigerator car fleet. These cars had their entire wood superstructure rebuilt above the frame sill, giving them another 10 to 15 years of service life. These cars became the R-30-9 and R-40-9 class cars on the PFE. Around 7,000 cars would go through this reconditioning program and many lasted into the 1950’s with the last being retired in 1966.

As usual, we have a wide range of decal sets lined up for our new models. Final release date for these cars is still pending. We are currently waiting for the new train wheels from Bricktracks before setting the release date.

The three cars talked about above are not all we’ve been working on. Here is a sneak peak at two more models coming later this year.

EMD SD40-2 diesel locomotive designed by Chris Stone.
Budd Rail Diesel Car by Matt Csenge. (yes, SIX variants!)

Coming Soon, The New BMR Online Store

New store front page.

Speaking of things on the Brick Model Railroader storefront, we will be debuting a new online store for Brick Model Railroader soon. While it’s served us well, we’ve outgrown the old store design. The new store will be much nicer to look at and easier to navigate. We’re still putting the finishing touches on things, but we plan to have the new store ready to go by the time the new Premium Instructions are released. In the meantime the current store is still up and running with all our current products.

Preview of the PCF decal section for the new store.

New Bricktracks Products

Lastly, we have two brief updates from our friends at BrickTracks, everyone’s favorite injection-molded track supplier.

The final mold for the R104 turnouts is in the process of being made. The last details have been tuned and we are closer than ever to having these turnouts on our layouts.

The second update regards the new replacement wheels for bearing wheel sets. The first batch of wheels has been produced and is en route to BrickTracks’ home base. However, the shipment is on the proverbial (or perhaps literal) “slow boat from China”, to quote BrickTracks.

There is certainly plenty to look forward to for fans of LEGO trains.

Thank you for reading.

Introducing The BMR podcast

Finally, after having this idea stuck in a drawer for far too long, we would like to introduce the BMR podcast: a fun and entertaining hour with, surprise, surprise, LEGO trains!

Pilot Episode

Last Sunday we had the pilot episode of the podcast. In case you missed it, it can be viewed here. The episode was on The Grand Brick Tours YouTube channel (Enrico’s Lego channel). The following episodes will be on the BMR YouTube channel.

Not only was the pilot episode longer, but the amount of podcast guests was a lot more than we were planning for the standard episodes. The builders featured in the pilot episode were:

  • UrbanErwin
  • Glenn Holland
  • Raised
  • Tijn
  • Big Daedy
  • Aloisvanesterhazy
  • Enrico

Thanks to them the pilot episode was a great success and a fun 1.5 hours, and hopefully the start of a fun new project.

Schedule

The podcast itself will be a hour long. The schedule for the podcast will be the following: 5 minutes of short introduction, 30-40 minutes of discussing certain topics, 10-15 minutes of answering question of our viewers. During the entire podcast there will be a live chat were viewers are able to ask multiple questions they would like to be answered by us. .  

We will try to post new podcast episodes on a regular basis, aiming for once monthly. We may need to modify or deviate from this schedule, but for now this is our plan.

New episodes will be announced at least three days in advance along with the date and times for different time zones. This information will also be shared across our social media pages.

The Crew and Guests

The crew will always consist of at least one or two BMR team members. Enrico will always be present as our host, since the podcast is his brain child. However, we will have more BMR members involved to keep a fresh and different cast of for each episode.

We will also be inviting other builders from across the world to join our podcasts and join in the conversation.

Topics

We will try like change the topics around just like the crew members, and will be top priority.  Topics of discussion will include BMR specific subjects, but also Lego community and train related items. We don’t want to give away to much, since were currently working on multiple fun and interesting topics.

We are excited to move forward with our podcast an we hope you are excited to watch. Please stay tuned for the notification for the next episode.

-Ciao

Enrico