TomOOO

As for UK trains how about... 9F (Evening star) Or 4F tank I am sure Lego can make a better job than me

That makes 2 of us then,

Amazon UK is showing that it is available from 10 September at 399.99 UKP Thanks sounds early to me

I have used this control to power the technic bulldozer, and it powered the 2 XL motor s fine, and you could drive the 2 small motors at the same time. So no problem with large loads Without the intermediate ir controller I think you get more power to the motors, the dozer seams to fly along

I know the boilers are a little large in both cases, but I like this design that comes from the Emerald night. Both engines perform well, the 9F is geared the same as the EN and the 4T is geared down 3 times as it is a "branch line" engine. The 9F runs better than I expected but it took a lot of work to get it to that stage, and my aim was working model that was reasonably robust rather then some of the amazing creations you see on this site. The 4T was finished recently and it only took 3 rebuilds to get it work well. Both need a little work on detail I know, but I don't get much time. Thanks for the interest Note : the emerald night has a design flaw with the valve gear that needs correcting before it runs smoothly, these engines use the same modification design.

Emmet would like to show of 2 new Engines in the Engine shed. The first is BR Standard class 9F (Evening Star) in green livery. This is the last of the steam trains built in the UK (hence the name) and although designated a freight (F), this class found itself a very capable passenger engine. With a top speed of 90 mph and not needing a banking engine on inclines on the more difficult routes this is the largest steam train built in the UK. And a favorite. ( I hope these links from Pinterst work....) Front view Notice the "flying boiler" design that is distinctive of this class Side view In the above you can see the 3 axle tender designed for this engine The next picture is some detail of the underside with axle 4 of the 10 driving wheels driven by a medium motor. You can also see that the 3 axle tender uses a fixed single wheel plus 2 axle bogie. This view also shows a pivoted rear coupling due to the long overhang, as the rotation is about the flanged 2nd and 4th driving axles. The extra blanks come from Big-Ben bricks. The next series are of Emmet showing us around the BR standard class 4T (tank) engine. Note that this was never painted in green livery. This MOC is rather tight on power function parts and it is all rather compact on the inside. I notice in my pictures that the bricks need puhing back togther, but I was carting the engines around This is a side view You can see the IR receiver in the coal bunker at the back, with the medium motor tucked just in front of that. This drives the 1st axle via a gear reduction to give a nice smooth and controllable engine with a slow speed. Here is the underside of the engine. It shows the 2-6-4 configuration of the wheels and that the 1st axle is driven as it was not possible to drive the rear axle due the compactness of the drive and fitting in the battery box in the boiler In fact, 2 of the green slopes are not fixed, they just sit. Some engineering work was done on some of the green slopes if you look at the top pictures. I have 4 Emerald nights so I feel that this was OK. Anyway, Emmet is very proud of the 2 additions to the engine shed , which now contains some 14 engines (I think) some are lego originals and some are MOCs - with many coaches and trucks.

I want to review a couple of moc's of mine and it would be convenient to link to my own Pinterest images as links. Is this OK. I did a search in the tech help and could not find this, but I am sorry in advance if this is information is available.

BT is not the way to go for Lego group since as noted it requires something else for the controller - or if they made their own controllers they hit the second problem - it is so....... non-standard, i really struggle to get my sbrick to work with my android phone. The entry of bt to the phone market resulted in so many "standards" which are a pain and just a fiddle to get working. IR is the way to go as it is much more reliable, does not need setting up and so easy for them to multiplex multiple channels on different frequency bands.

I was attending a scientific conference last week and one of the speakers gave a talk on the use of databases and big data. The used lego trains as an analogy of the database "engine" and the data payload. I spent much of the talk trying to identify the trains (photos), they had. Certainly a lot from the 12V era plus a number of variants on the hobby train and a a few MOCs. Sometimes it is nice to see that I am not only person with a huge collection of Lego trains (and technic)

I wonder how difficult it would be to add power functions for drive/steering, is there space to add this easily.

The price in Euro hurts, you should see the UK price when compared to older sets (fall in pound).

I provided a legal break down of this in some detail elsewhere which I cannot find now. As people have noted and in summary of my long discussion before... 1) There is no issue with ABS bricks, lego actually "copied" this years ago and has failed to "protect" the lego brick as a being covered by a patent. This is "correct". 2) First problem is loss of IP : where a certain company has made exact copies of the designs not just of lego but also of MOC's provided by AFOL's. The copy of these designs is a loss of revenue to Lego as design is expensive as it requires many people to both create these and QA them and make them accessible to the general public as a working model without errors, robust and easily made. This also highlights a problem of the Lego business model where the bricks themselves have a value which is of course much less than the price/brick value, but you have to pay for the design component of sets. But if you buy the bricks separately then this costs more than the set. So the price of bricks subsidizes the design cost - which is the massive problem here, and the price of brick cost massively subsidizes sets. So this Chinese company is undermining the fundamental business model of Lego where they have to charge more for "bricks" to pay for the design. Lego can only compete on this if it gets rid of all designs and only markets bricks ! 3) Breaking franchise agreement : there are multiple sets that have been copied where Lego pays a franchise agreement, ie Volvo, Porche, Star wars... Therefore Lego has loss of revenue since the company is breaking this, and franchise companies could join the legal action as you cannot sell a "copy" of a real thing (Ie a Porche 911) without paying Porche. 4) Loss of IP on design and printing - ie these copies a so close they are using the graphic design - again expensive. Just look at the packaging discussion on this forum to see how important graphic design is. Even the instruction are expensive to create - check and double check that they work. Think about taking a technic set apart - it seams so locked together - you wonder how you made it in the first place. 5) Loss of face : If people believe that they are "being ripped off on price" by Lego because Lego is more expensive (see 2/3/4) then Lego has Loss of face with the public. Ie the public cannot be expected in most part to understand ROI (return on investment) and other parts of Lego business model which requires them to sell Lego at a certain price point. I am certain most people will not realize the subsidization of design in sets by brick cost. 6) Future development costs : We expect Lego to come out with new product streams : for example Mind-storms and power functions; the R&D (research and development) costs are significant. We know that some of this is subsidized (ie MIT developed the first mindstorms ideas, so these came at cost), but even so this future development path is very expensive to maintain. Copies of Lego require protection (just like drug development) or there is no point of developing new Lego product lines. 7) Old designs and new designs. Lego makes no direct revenue out of old models as it retires old sets and makes no revenue from these. In fact it provides instruction downloads for old sets (though of course buying the bricks to build these is 2-3 times more expensive than the sets - see 2). New sets are the problem and I saw multiple technical sets available before Lego made them available - I wonder if 2017 H1 technical release date was brought forward because of this. 8) Loss of face : if people (children is the main target) believe that this brick is not very good and models don't work then they believe that the brick = Lego is a bad toy. Ie there is less of face for Lego if the customers believe that the ABS brick does not work as a toy. The critical issue here is "brand recognition" - ie more children actually probably understand "real-Lego" and "fake-Lego" at an early age as Lego brand recognition is so strong; so Lego is unlikely to win on this issue: ie this point only reinforces the Lego quality issue (particularly with Technics where the tolerances are so high, or mini-figures where perfection is only good enough). 8) Support : Lego provides a very high level of support, will replace missing parts, are always helpful even if you did not buy from shop@home. That is expensive, bet you won't get an answer from clone companies when you have a missing part. So think carefully, this is very bad for Lego but ALSO very bad for us : Lego could drop all design and support as the only way to compete. All new idea product streams would stop (power-functions are not perfect, but they really are very good and the PM (pulse modulation) control is way beyond anything from the model railway system - lego trains work much better than h-----y trains when running slowly or with lots of rolling stock). Then there are the AFOL's that loose all their designs - even now I imagine there will be restrictions on "free" design from AFOL's . Sorry about the typo's and also missed a couple of definitions: IP : Intellectual Property : the role of Patents is to protect ideas - it recognizes that a person came up with a idea and owns that idea QA : Quality Assessment

I see that in the UK and Germany (but not the US) some of the H1 2017 technic sets came out today a little early I also see that there are no shortages this year before Christmas, first time for a few years.

I buy mostly (flagship) technic,trains and the ideas; being quite old I fortunately have quite reasonable pocket money allowance. I have some 50+ sets which I try and keep complete, but occasionally MOC something which combines a few sets. I have a busy job and care for some terminally ill so quite often I just pick a technic set and build it over a period of a few days then take is apart; I build it slowly just to chill out, perfect solution for me. I also often fill a room with trains and have just completed a MOC of "evening star" to go with some 10 other train sets and lots of MOC rolling stock. I have got to the stage where storage is a problem as I like to keep the boxes in good condition so I am not sure what to do with the 2017 technic sets - 2016 was a "bad" year for me as I bought so many, I am not sure about the plane and the boat but I bet I end up buying them.

Hi I saw a you tube video on Lepin when trying to find lego technic 2017 sets and more detail on these future sets. The important point to me is that it is a complete line up of 2017 technic sets for 2017 done by Lepin. Of course from a legal perspective this is loss of IP (intellectual property) and loss of revenue (design is very expensive for Lego) and I have provided a legal discussion on this in detail elsewhere. Yes I know there is a current open dispute in the courts on this. The implications of this video content is that Lepin has exact copies and presumably the detail design before release which suggests thyat Lego have loss IP by either hacking or leak of IP from a person. Ie if you are trying to copy design, you need time to tool up the new pieces, and you need the design instructions to do this, and to bring these out for 2017 at the same time as Lego is quite a problem and suggest more than a "copy" but a loss secret knowledge. Very sad.