Calgary and area enthusiasts sharing experiences with LEGO Trains.
The Calgary LEGO Train Club would like to wish everyone a happy Canada Day on July 1st. The pictures feature common celebrations found across Canada and a litte bit of our history, includng: Canada Day Pancake Breakfast, Canada Day Parade celebrating the beautiful grain cars that transport grain from our valued farmers to the world, Citizenship Day at City Hall were we welcome new Canadians, and the Last Spike… which brought unity to Canada so many years ago. Happy Canada Day!
We are thrilled with the effort that Michael Gale of FX Bricks has put into bringing metal clad L-Scale (LEGO Scale) train track back to life. For those of us the participate in train shows, battery powered trains just do not work adequately well enough for eight hour stretches.
Michael has stated that the new track will be available on March 1st, 2021. Check out his debut video, in which he also provides an excellent history on LEGO trains.
The Emerald Night, LEGO® CREATOR Expert set 10194, is a favorite among LEGO Train fans… definitely in the top ten and maybe even the all time favorite to date as a set. There are a few minor flaws that have been discovered in this sets design, including the piston push rod support, the rear floating wheel set and the motor gear support; these were listed in the excellent magazine RailBricks.
As our club uses many of our locomotives at Train Shows where we run through other people’s displays, we have a standard that trains are to be less than ten studs wide. The Emerald Night is exactly ten studs wide, but when station platforms have a ten stud gap, there is not sufficient tolerance for the trains to pass through the station reliably. Additionally, the Emerald Night looks bulky with traditional Technic based connecting rods.
With advances in 3D printing, we took it upon ourselves as a club to come up with a push rod design that we could 3D print. Information can be found on Thingiverse. We are very pleased with how this turned out and are looking foreward to post COVID-19 where we can try it out at a Train Show.
