Jongudmund

Yesterday I blogged about building a car transporter set that I bought with the intention of turning this rather dull blue wagon into something more interesting. The first thing to do was take off all the bits above the base plate. The little Octan tank will come in useful somewhere. This left a nice bare surface to start building on. For reference, this plate is 28 studs long and 6 wide. The holes in the middle are because it is also used in the model locomotive and the wires need to go through somewhere. Just to give a sense of the below decks engineering, here's a picture of the wagon's wheelsets. You can see how it has two free-turning bogies to enable it to cope with the sharp radii of the Lego track system. Relocating the transporter deck to the wagon was tricky. For starters, it meant moving the connectors out a bit as the red bases with holes for technic pins had to overhang the side of the wagon. (Hey, in the background are the cow and scrap wagons!) When completed this meant the transporter deck was 10 studs wide, when measured from the outer edges of the support beam mountings. The wagon base was only 6 studs wide. That's two thirds wider in real terms and would make the clearance pretty huge on corners. This felt even more obvious when the decks were collapsed for loading, but at least they lay flat (well, flattish). One plus was there was plenty of space up top for both cars. In fact, too much space, as the top deck was 32 studs long.You can also see in this view just how wide the whole mechanism was. The overhang on the top deck was a real problem. For one thing it looked a bit weird. For another if I ever built another of these things they couldn't be coupled together without clashing as the overhang went beyond the buffer heads. I know it's only Lego, but it just wouldn't be built like this. You can see the overhang in this photo, and also the instability on the lower deck caused by having to mask the base units for the upper deck supports. So, in conclusion, it was a workable model but it didn't look right and it didn't work very well. I wasn't happy with it. Somehow I was going to have to find a way to lose 4 studs from the top deck and move the supports in to the true edges of the wagon. An 8 stud wide car transporter would still be ungainly, but it would work. The great thing about Lego is you can just take it apart and put it back together again if it's not looking right. In my next blog post I will tell you all about that.

Me too!

At the end of my previous blog post I said I had plans for the rather boring long wagon that came in the original cargo train set (60052). I was prompted to use it as a 'donor' base wagon for a car transporter project by this: It was on special reduction in my local Asda. I saw it one evening and had a think about whether I wanted to buy it, then went back the next day and bought it. I think it's good value as the car transporter alone usually cost between £20 and £30. The other two models came boxed within the box. I plan to keep them as gifts for some of the kids I know at some point in the future. It's very rare I buy a Lego model and don't build the model it's supposed to be at least once. I had a good reason to do it this time as I wanted to see if the car loading mechanism was transferable to a wagon. I skipped bag 1 as I wanted to get straight on with the truck. Bag 2 is a fairly straightforward, satisfying build of the truck cab. Bag 3 contained the truck ramps and the trailer. And then I went back to bag 1, to build the cars. In the parts photo you can see the moulded chassis for the cars. They are 12 studs long. This turned out to be an important detail. Also in bag 1 were the minifigures. I particularly liked the yuppie's slicked hair. The driver's clipboard is a sticker, not a printed piece. I've already made my thoughts clear in previous posts about how stickers are a disappointing substitute. When built, the cars looked pretty nice. There was even space included for the yuppie's briefcase. I tried them out on the transporter. But two problems quickly became apparent. Firstly, being 12 studs long the wheels lined up badly with the circular slopes on the floor of the transporter's lower level. This led to a chronic case of 'overhang'. Secondly, the ramps to drive the cars up onto the transporter were too short. Which led to an insurmountable grounding problem. I'm surprised by this because the engineering in Lego sets is usually much better. Most of the time they design the cars to fit the space for the cars to go, but equally if they knew they were using the 12 stud chassis piece, why didn't they work out where the wheels were going to be on the floor of the transporter? It was also annoying that you couldn't drop the truck's upper level when the trailer was attached. So you would have to load up the truck first, then attach the trailer and load that up. Fine, as long as you load the cars in reverse delivery order, but any change of schedule and that would be a real bind for our delivery driver. So, there were several learning points to take from this. Firstly, the build techniques and most of the parts looked transferable to a wagon. Secondly, I'd need to make sure the car wheels weren't positioned on the top of slippery circular slopes. Thirdly, I needed to find a way to bring the top levels down together. So the next thing to do was take the car transporter apart again ready to re-use the pieces...

When in June? I might come up for that. (Please don't say the 11th as I have something on!)

Well, I'm back after more than six months. When I started this blog last year I talked about the train set that kicked this off. I made a throwaway remark in that opening post about turning the cattle wagon that came in the set into a wagon for scrap 'metal' (actually Lego Technic and Bionicle bits). But I didn't have any pictures of it. I then moved on to blog about tanker wagons and didn't say anything more about the newly repurposed scrap wagon. So, this post is a bit late coming. Apologies! What's prompted it is *cough* an eBay purchase of another cow wagon. I'd been meaning to get one for a while and then one finally appeared on eBay for less than £10 and, anyway, what we have here is effectively a before and after shot of the new arrival complete with cow, and the converted scrap wagon. You can see there in the picture how unsuitable the wagon is for transporting livestock. For one thing any cow worth it's salt would be able to jump out of there. I like the Lego cow. It's quite a friendly looking beastie. She also comes with a farmer to look after her. Again, not exactly true to life as putting a person in a metal cage wagon with a cow for a train journey is likely to end poorly. It's a nice mini-figure, though, complete with neatly trimmed beard. The cow from my original set has been absorbed into my larger collection of Lego and this one is going to go the same way, along with her hay bales, her farmer friend and his red bucket. Actually I might keep the bucket for the goods shed area I'm planning. What I need to do now is sort out another scrap load a bit like this one. I'm planning on using the blue crane to load and unload scrap on one of the sidings. I do have a tub somewhere of other Bionicle bits and random Lego parts that would be suitable for an industrial scrap-pile. I will fish them out shortly. Meanwhile I have another project coming using one of the other wagons from the original set. It won't look like this for long!

Yeah, Sarah, I was thinking if they had the jar on the counter in the style of a sweeties pick and mix as someone else had said. Makes you wonder... impulse purchases and all that.

I've just gone through some of the preceding pages on this thread and realised that a) it's buggered up my cookies. Ebay is going to show me a lot of rubbish now as its suggestions of things it thinks I might be interested in, and b ) some of these things sold! for money!

That's not a bad idea really. You might only want one pig for a backyard pig sty for example.

The Pontypool & Blaenavon railway has a lovely Austerity in Mech Navvies livery. The thing out of place on this line is of course the big fat coaches! EDIT: Just seen there's a pic of this on the previous page as well. They also have this lovely little Barclay 0-4-0 What's not to love? (Oh, don't get me wrong I like big engines as much as the next man, but surely we can all find room in our hearts for these too)

I like the bridge on an angle. That's a clever way of making the layout look less 'boxy'.

Like the wagons

I love this lay out. I really want to see it in real life one day.

Looks good Bartb

It's a shame they never kept a railway down into the docks from that angle. They could have run a light rail ink down it now and looped round to meet the Cardiff Bay Station. Would have been an excellent site on Newport Road for a park and ride to get people into the bay or the city centre on a mass transit system. Probably never economically viable, but it would have been pretty cool.

I liked the Swansea show and there seemed to be a good few kids looking at the layouts as well, which was good to see. My favourite lay-out, I have to admit, was the Vale of Rheidol narrow gauge that looped round itself three times in a circuit. Good fun to see. There were some really nice looking much larger models there too (Gauge 3 or bigger). I went with an engineer and her soon-to-be husband. Hopefully they will get the model railway bug.

So I bought a box of track in Smyth's weekend 20% sale. This stuff never gets reduced even though it's been in the Lego range in unchanged packaging since 2010 at least. So 20% was tempting. Specifically I bought Lego Set 7499 - Straight and Flexible tracks. You can see from the back how old this is. These are the train ranges from five years ago. Lego are onto their second new cargo train since then. In the box you get 8 straight pieces and sixteen flexible pieces. The straight pieces are 13.5 cm long. Four flexible pieces equate to a straight piece. They are a bit odd to look at, but my thinking is they will help in producing a freight yard layout to bring points closer together instead of the set curve pieces. Here's what the pieces look like, showing what can be done with the flexible pieces. Also in the box you get some suggested track layouts, which can be made if you buy all the long-discontinued sets available five years ago. On the other side you get a poster, which when studied in detail reveal some shocking, unsafe behaviour from the mini-figures who work on the train lines. For example, walking along the middle of a line through a point. Sensible? Hardly. Doing it with your back to a nearby train? Silly, indeed. Or how about this guy hanging off the side of a wagon? True, it's not being propelled, but what is he doing? That's an accident waiting to happen. After noticing those bozos, I decided to have a closer look at the picture on the back of the box, and sure enough, while not dangerous, this chap is hardly an exemplary worker. I hope this sort of thing only happens in Lego City and not in the real world!

At the end of my previous blog post, the new blue crane was finished. But that gap between the crane and the track. That just didn't look right. We all know from the real railway that plants make a nuisance of themselves, nature reasserts itself quite quickly. I felt that bare area would quickly become home to some plant life. So, out came the bits boxes. I particularly went for 1x1 slopes (known as 'cheese wedges') in various greens and other 'planty' colours. I also fished out some 1x1 barrels with leaves, flower stalks and other assorted bits of green, just to see how a bit of detailing would look. It quickly knocked the hard edges off the model. Varying the greens was difficult, given Lego's limited colour palette, but what little variety I could find helped as well. By combining some of the features I could add in a flowering plant, as often seen in the wilder parts of railway undergrowth. In my head the little guy is coming along with the brush to sweep away some of the pesky moss and weeds. They won't stay down for long! This was a few minutes messing around to see what could be done. Compared to the rampant shrubbery created by master builders it looks a bit poor, to be honest. But I'm holding off anything too creative until I have the crane and the rest of the freight yard in some kind of display. The great thing about working in Lego is you can try things and if it doesn't look right or you just fancy it a bit different, it's a simple case of taking it apart and clipping it back together again. Those weeds may grow several times over until I'm happy with them!

The 'New crane, blue crane Part 1' blog post dealt with the contents of 'Bag 7'. Now on to 'Bag 8'. Here's what you get: That little box contains the thread for attaching the crane scoop. Most of these pieces were to construct the cab. It's a well-designed piece, with an opening front to make it easy to put the guy in and get him back out again. The rear of the cab is finished off using a technique known as Studs Not On Top (SNOT). This is a technique Lego has really embraced in the past five years or so. For example, the large VW Camper Van they released a few years ago has an entire SNOT front, which you build separately and then attach. In the next two pictures you can see how a small plate has been built on and is then attached to a multi-way piece to run perpendicular to the rest of the cab model. So with a little bit of black thread, a bit of building and a small bit of SNOT, the crane was finished. Or was it... More next time.

A couple of posts back I said I'd received a package ordered off eBay. If you've been wondering what's inside, then here you go: These are bags six and seven from Lego set 60098, the latest heavy haul cargo train. Specifically, these are the bags that make up an attractive blue crane, which I decided would be perfect for my attempt at a freight operation. I particularly wanted to use it with the open wagon I had converted from being a unlikely cow transporter to a scrap metal wagon. At some point I would like to dig out my old Lego Technic treads and build a conveyor to move scrap onto using the crane. I had seen this crane, built and on display, in the Lego Shop, so I knew it looked really good in real life. Sometimes, as with all packaging, Lego looks different out of the box. In the set the crane is paired with a hopper wagon that you can load 1x1 barrels into using the crane scoop. The hopper has opening side doors to unload the barrels back out so you can use the crane scoop to reload them and start the whole play cycle off again. The hopper is an alright-looking wagon. However, the other two wagons in the set are just flat opens with a JCB style backhoe excavator on one and a helicopter on the other. The excavator looks OK but the helicopter is a very basic looking model. It looks like the kind of Lego toy given away free with newspapers, it's that basic. Neither of those wagons particularly appealed to me and at £140 for the set, with just a loop of track, no points, and a fairly ordinary looking loco, there was no way I was going to buy set 60098. I was willing to buy the crane as a separate set from a Lego dealer on eBay. Several people buy and break up the larger sets into component parts to sell on eBay. This cost me about £30 once postage was factored in, which is what I would pay if Lego released it as a proper set to sell in stores. So, to start with I opened bag 7. These are the bits you get. I quickly encountered my first hurdle: Yep, that's right. No track was sent with the pack and the very first instruction after building the mini-figures is to put together three pieces of track. Fortunately I had some track to use. But that's something to bear in mind for the future. Work quickly progressed. Soon we had a base for the crane. Then we started working on the legs. You can see in this photo the way the legs and the side walls of the crane pit interlock to enable it to slide backwards and forwards. I've added a circle on the relevant bits. I really like the black leg spars as they remind me of Lego Space sets I had as a kid. There was also possibly my favourite detail of the whole build at the end of bag 7 - Safety First! And there we were, one bag down and halfway done. The rest of the build will be covered in the next blog post.

Another part of set 60052, along with the track, loco and wagons, was a gantry crane, already shown on this blog in this picture: And also in action here: However, now it's time for a closer look. The crane was fun to build, if a bit challenging. On the plus side it is a nice shade of industrial cautionary yellow. It's got an interesting mechanism to allow it to move along a train to get its jib into position. The down side is that it's very light (well, it is just plastic bricks after all), so a dangling sleeve, or slightly careless movement, will knock the gantry askew. It also relies heavily on stickers. Lego have their reasons for using stickers - it keeps costs down and the bricks are easier to re-purpose by modellers if they aren't printed. I don't really think those are great reasons. If you're going to spend £140 on a Lego set you're probably just as likely to spend £150 on that Lego set, which I think would cover the printing. And every AFOL I talk to much prefers printed blocks to stickers. So I wonder who Lego has asked to get the feedback that stickers are better for making other models with. But anyway, here is the crane, built as per the instructions: It's quite a simple process... ...first the wagon comes in. In this case, it's the cable drum wagon being unloaded. The jib comes down and is attached to the cable using a convenient length of chain. The cable drum goes up. The gantry crane moves forward and the actual crane jig moves sideways. And finally the cable is lowered to the ground. You can then do it in reverse to reload the cable drum back onto the wagon. If you wanted to. I'm not sure how the crane is meant to be controlled. I presume by radio control, although there is a little office built next to it with a natty interior. (And no rear wall - a common issue with Lego buildings.) I quite like the touch that someone has left their mug next to the computer. Who says Lego isn't realistic? So, that's the gantry crane. It's a challenging build that's a passable representation of the kind of thing you see in freight yards. It could have been a bit more robust - I imagine for children it could be a bit frustrating and fiddly. It could have had printed parts instead of stickers. But overall it's quite pleasing.

You're right of course. I have some of those hooks and links that came out of a tub of random Lego parts. They stopped using them quite early on, I think. Thanks for the link. The magnets developed for the trains were also used in my favourite ever Lego Space theme M:Tron.