I know I sound like a total dork, but these were my first introduction to model railroading. The Lego 9 Volt motor is one of the greatest electric motors I’ve seen; it can crawl along and also zip across the rails. It can also pull a heavy load at speed. The only things wrong with it are that it sounds awful and makes steam locos look like diesels with shells.
And the scratchbuilding possibilities are endless. A friend and I once scratchbuilt a full Super Chief consist, Pleasure Dome and all. Those cars almost made Lego’s hideous F3 look good. Almost. I’ve seen people building F-units for their favorite road and even some AC6000CWs out of Legos.
I realize these are definitely toys, but they are much cheaper alternatives to similar-sized Lionels, are infinitely customizable, and are a great beginning for little modelers-to-be.
Lego, like its predecessor Meccano, is a great toy in that what you can build is only limited by ones imagination and number of parts (parents budget [;)]) You will note that I said “toy” not “learning tool”, too often the fun bit can be lost.
Just recently a friend got some video editing software and showed me his first attempt , the subject being the local 2008 Train Show. One of the invited exhibitors had a large Lego Layout and it was great to see again. ( My friend has not yet added it to his web site yet.)
As I have stated before I get a “kick” out of observing others achieving enjoyment out of this great hobby of ours, besides out of small beginnings, who knows what will grow ???..
Dork? Hardly. The New England Lego Users Group always has a huge layout at the Amherst Model Railroad Show every January. It’s always one of the highlights of the show.
It was Lego, which kindled my son´s interest in engineering science and made him get his master´s degree “summa cum laude”. Although a heavy drain on the family budget, it was an investment that paid of quite well.
Lego trains can be really fascinating - I have seen locos, which are looking surprisingly realistic.
While LEGO could never be true to scale like more traditional model railroading you would be surprised at what some builders out there are doing. My club PennLUG has been steadily evolving our LEGO train layouts to a fine art,
I’m 35, and when I was a youngster, my friends and I would build our miniature empires in LEGO. They were mostly simple sets. I remember when my friend showed me his new LEGO train…and then it began! we spent entire days planning out and building new LEGO railways serving all kinds of unique industries around the room, such as, a castle, the fire station, and of course a large fleet of spacecraft.
We could build anything. The only limits were available space and time… I’m seeing a correlation here.
No offense, but while the general outlines of the Lego product may resemble the outlines of the real thing (on a very coarse scale), there’s very little realistic appearance to it, as far as I can see.
My “legos” were Lincoln Logs, Erector sets, and American Bricks… Back in the '50s, these toys quickly separated the builders from the non builders. Many of us “builders” worked in these “toys” with Lionel or Flyer or Marx trains. And the rest is history…
Those “toys” taught us a lot, and helped us to merge imagination with the reality of what we could build - or not. They were invaluable learning tools - although that turned out to be a hindsight realization.
Today’s kids have their legos, but what else is out there for them? And are today’s kids really all that interested in this stuff? I wonder, for the lure of a smart phone or Ipad or other electronic gizmo seems to be uppermost in their minds.
Anyway, I digress… Kudos for those working with Legos!!!
I myself, nor any of the other LEGO builders I know are under no delusions that what we build with LEGO is going to be as scale perfect as a more traditional model railroad scale. But we certainly love to push the boundaries with the brick and try to get close. It may not be perfectly scale but there is some seriously impressive modeling going on in the world of LEGO trains.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no issue at all with folks who “model” using Legos. Some of the big Lego layouts I’ve seen at conventions are very impressive, and obviously have taken a lot of work to construct, to say nothing of the obvious creativity that goes into those layouts. I just don’t see them as resulting in a realistic representation of the real thing. But then prototype fidelity, at least past a recognizable resemblance, isn’t the point, is it?
I´d consider only the last model to a fair representation of the real thing, but all others are just as much fun as this. Where does Lego come in? Just pure fun!
