Jongudmund

It's been 4 years since I last gave this a bump. Happy to hear from anyone looking to move on some trains.

I've been out of the hobby for a while but when I saw this on Facebook I let out an audible gasp. All the very best wishes to all the staff involved.

Thanks everyone

I have a Playmobil set that I've been thinking of upgrading into a proper garden railway. I'm not keen on the playmobil track. Has anyone here used the plastic track sold by ECR (eg on eBay) and how does that fare? Any new additions to the line will most likely be battery powered so I don't need metal track to conduct electricity - although obviously having that option might be useful in which case what's the most cost effective way to purchase metal track?

have you thought about using the trains to deliver drinks to people? I'd love that - order at the bar and have it brought to my "lineside table" on a little train.

Could you have just one track going into a tunnel (or a couple of tunnels) and one not? Or one only going into the tunnel at half the length? Would make it look more interesting.

Ooh, this looks fun.

Del, I'm happy for you to take it.

Is this still available?

Gone

When is your shed arriving? Have you started building this yet?

This is my fourth post about the Lego passenger train sets (set number 60197) that I received for Christmas. Post one was about building the train set. Post 2 was about adding lights. Post 3 was about building a dummy engine car. And this post continues the theme from post 3, modding the train set to make it suit my purpose. I often say that if you can't make any changes to a Lego set you've built to improve it, then you may as well give up on Lego as a hobby. I see a lot of photos and videos of creative track lay outs, and then Lego trains straight out of the box trundling around. It's a shame, really. Personally, if I take, as an example, all the freight wagons I have bought, it averages about one wagon per set that I don't change or adapt. So that's about 1 in 3 wagons that I consider 'okay' and ready to run. (Of course, this doesn't apply to collectible stuff - I wouldn't mod my TTX cars, although I do think I could build better ones. I must have a go at that sometime.) So, anyway, what mods did I put in this? I've already said how I had to adapt the cab to reduce glare from the lights that I fitted. And I built one loco as an unpowered dummy car. What else did I do? Well... I like the passenger cars, but being honest, they only had four seats in them, and that really isn't many. However, I had some spare seats from the tiny, token "station" that's included in the set. So I took them and raided my bits box for some 2x2 plates. But I had a problem. Do you see this yellow bit on the floor towards the end of the carriage? That's the bogie mounting pin attached to the wheelsets. If I encroached on it the bogies wouldn't turn. What to do? What to do? That's right! Round plates! No encroachment and they do the same job of lifting the seat one plate's thickness off the floor. I can't put a minifigure to sit in the seats, because there's no room for their arms, which is a bit disappointing. But at least having the seats there makes it look more like an actual coach. Having two train sets meant I had two driver minifigures. I took a satchel off one of the passengers minifgures and put it on the driver. I think this is a passable look for a ticket inspector or guard. I added in some more passengers. Currently there is a woman from Ninjago City, Lester the bowler-hatted mascot of the Leicester Square flagship Lego Store, Spider-Man and C3PO from Star Wars. But it's in the buffet car where it's all kicking off with some very hungry patrons. Yes, that's right, baby velociraptors courtesy of some very cheap Jurassic World sets. They've got eyes on that hot dog!

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!