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Heritage Park Railway Days

Wow….  Summer has blown by – the leaves are starting to turn yellow and fall to the ground, children are back in school, the mornings are cooler with the occasionally frost… and that means that Fall is here. Along with the change in season, the members of the Calgary LEGO® Train Club have been very busy and are excited to participate again in Heritage Park Railway Days on Saturday, September 28th and Sunday, September 29th.

The theme this year for the Calgary LEGO® Train Club will be a display stretching from the prairies through the mountains to Vancouver.

We hope that you are able to make it to Heritage Park and view our display.  If not, though, we will post photo’s in our photo gallery.

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LEGO® Corrugated Tank Car MOC

It was about two years ago when I was reading (and re-reading) a number of the Railbricks Magazine issues that I found an excellent article on a corrugated tank car. It utilized the 2×2 sport LEGO® brick, which is often used on cars as a spoiler or some other accessory, to make a round shape. The original creator, Anthony Sava, is very creative and has a number of locomotives featured on Big Ben’s Bricks gallery page. Back to the Railbricks Magazine, you can find the instruction starting on page 25 of the Fall 2011 edition (Issue 10).
Anthony Sava’s LEGO Corrugated Tank Car Design
Anthony Sava’s LEGO Corrugated Tank Car Design

Long story short, it took me a few years to collect the LEGO® bricks required to complete this train. I wanted to build this train in a bright color and choose yellow, primarily due to the availability of yellow 2×2 sport LEGO® bricks. The inside of the train is quite complex in that the bottom section is built “up-side-down” to create the underside of the car. I am looking forward to using these cars in an industrial section of the Calgary Lego Train Club‘s display at Heritage Park‘s Railway Days at the end of September.

Five Yellow Corrugated Tank Cars
Five Yellow Corrugated Tank Cars
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Power Pickup for PF Motors

Many members in our club are very excited with Sage Railworks, a Belgium LEGO® train fan, who has merged “O” scale wheels with spring loaded contacts and his own ingenuity to make power pick up off of metal 9V train track for Power Function (PF) motors, which are typically powered by batteries.  The LEGO® Group switched from metal track and motors with built in power pickup to PF motors and completely plastic track about six years ago (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Trains for more information on the history).  For groups such as the Calgary LEGO® Train Club, metal track is very important as we would consume too many batteries over the span of a multi-day show.

For more information, check out the following Bricklink page.  There is also a very good article on EuroBricks.