AgentRick

Well it's good to hear that the metal orders are back on track. Been waiting to try out an R56 loop for a while now.

I was a wee lad of six years old when I got 4565 Freight and Crane Railway and a 9V Transformer on Christmas morning, and I'm pretty sure I still have those same track and transformer to this day (The train itself is long gone from countless rebuilding and mocs through childhood, but I still come across the red 6x28 train plates with the 9V train logo on the sides here and there). Back then S@H was out of the question for , so for about a year I only had the loop the set came with until my birthday rolled around and I got one each of the three track types available then (Eight straights, eight curves, and two switches) and 2126. By the release of the Super Chief I had started buying my own trains, but as I was approaching my teens I started to drift away from Lego in general. The trains and the rest of my bricks went into storage for a few years when I heard about how Lego was changing to RC trains. I dove back into the hobby by grabbing both RC trains available back then (Kinda regret getting the passenger set though ) and was somewhat impressed with some of the new pieces but disliked the huge battery draining RC Battery chassis. After that I would slowly drift back into trains with the Hobby Train, the advent of Power Functions, the Emerald Night, and currently now with the Horizon Express. I don't really buy any more track though, 9V or Plastic. I've got three sets of 9V switches and enough straights and curves that I can fit into my small abode. As said before train motors and magnets are always welcome though!

PF is the better option if you're just starting out, honestly. You can probably grab 2-3x as much track/supplies in plastic rail/PF motors+sensors than when buying 9V supplies. 9V gives that Model Railroading feeling a bit better though.

Great looking station, if I must say. Where on earth did you get those lovely Dark Blue Police hats though?

Colorwise the Constitution is fairly muted with greys and browns. The dark green on the Train is already a good start for making the train Christmasy. I'd say start by adding more white to the train by swapping out the brown windows. As for the two cars it comes with, the most obvious thing to change is getting rid of the gatling gun . Add some trees to the flat car for a new load. The boxcar is probably the weakest part of the set that could be made festive, so I'd just scrap it or rebuild it from the ground up. Add some passenger cars and maybe a caboose and you're set as far as cars go. Spread out some greens and reds and some white through the train and it should look and feel fairly festive.

Yeah, if this were made into an actual set, I could see several changes to it to cut down on the price. No track, like the older Holiday Train Cut out the water tower Lose the snowbanks Change the car to a flatbed truck to interact better with the luggage Change one of the freight cars for a second passenger car. Keep the tank wagon though If I remember correctly the large train wheels are gang-molded together to make two blind wheels for every four flanged wheels, so you might want to keep that in mind too. Also a better shot of the included minifigures might help too. There aren't that many good shots of the figures included, other than the engineer and the man in the car. A group shot could help too.

Back on topic, I'm really fond of the 2016 50th Anniversary idea from a few pages back. I could easily see them making a Steam set based off of 720 or 725 for the Blue-Rail era, a modern version of 7740 with Tan and Dark Red in place of Yellow/Red for the Gray-Rail era, and a version of 4564 for the 9V era, even if it might be similar to 3677.

Can the passenger/freight sets include a small structure to go with the wagons, for example a loading/unloading platform for a freight set?

I'm pretty sure he meant BS in the term of Penn and Teller's TV series, and not an abbreviation of a set like PR = Parisian Restaurant.

I always dig seeing more unique steam locos like Cab Forwards and Garratts, Kinda makes me wanna make one for myself.

Searching for Mac programs I stumbled upon http://www.railmodeller.com/ , which happens to have a 9V set of tracks along with 12V and Monorails too. The only downside is you can't save the layouts from the free demo (But you can always screencap them for later use).

What's commonly referred to as Trans-Black is actually Trans-Brown. It's a common misconception, I know. As for the cars themselves, I'd say keep passenger cars under 36 studs max length. Anything over 40 doesn't look all that nice personally. Also instead of having the carriages go from 6 to 8 studs wide from the base why not use an 8-wide base?

I'm with everyone else. The sides are a bit barren. Maybe add some pin-striping to break up the large mass of white up top? And perhaps on the roof why not try adding some fans or horns?

Whoops, sorry bout that. I fixed it in the post but I can't fix the thread title. Yeah, those were a few quick modules I whipped up for photo taking. I doubt I'll have the money to get a full loop of modules up anytime soon.