I've said before how I was very lucky and got given two of the Lego 60197 train sets for Christmas. This wasn't a mistake! I wanted two because I knew they would form one very nice train.

I belong to some Lego trains Facebook groups. I've seen a lot of posts in the groups about putting two 60197 passenger trains together. Quite a few people have mentioned the difficulty of running both motors in sync and having to polarise one to run backwards instead of forwards, and so on. Having test run the 3-car train and seeing how fast it whips along, I really didn't see the point of putting a second motor in. So when I built the second set, I built a 'dummy' car.

This started with my bag of left-over train bits from when I turned my second white passenger train (60051) into a couple of coaches to extend that train to something that looked a bit more realistic.

I also fished out one of the instruction books from that set as it had instructions for how to build a dummy bogie to replace the all-in-one motor block that Lego use.

In the end I built this dummy bogie and move the yellow connection plate two studs inwards from the couplings to make it fit in the right mounting hole.

This isn't a like-for-like replacement for the drive bogie on the powered engine, because I couldn't fit the axle-boxes that are used on the motor's driving wheels. They don't fit over ordinary wheelsets.

It's not the end of the world because you;d only be able to see that if you know where to look.

One of the other issues was the bluetooth battery box. This forms an integral part of the train structure, but I wanted to keep it separate for use in another project. A quick rummage in the bag of spare bits pictured earlier, and I built a replacement to the same dimensions.

This next photo shows how I followed the instructions using the ersatz battery box.

And then one final change... red lights on the back.

These don't light up, unfortunately. It would be difficult to run a wire the length of the train. But I might experiment with a freestanding light brick at some point.

Now, if you can stand terrible shaky filming on a mobile phone, and you have 1 minute and 37 seconds to spare, here is a video showing the train running, switching the lights on, "night running", and a little review of the interiors of the coaches.

https://youtu.be/wiTx_o7pKh8

Thanks for reading!