Locomotive Annie

Sluban make a good few Three Kingdoms sets which I've always thought were really nice. That would be one reason why Lego wouldn't want to bring out a historical Chinese range because a local manufacturer already has it covered.

What a lovely steam monorail and quite ingenious in the way the drive is laid out. I have a big soft spot for steam monorails as I built one of my own some time ago using the Ewings system. http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=81307&hl=kotanga

Hello everyone, just a quick note to say that I'm not dead or anything. I have had a lot of problems with my health and as a result I haven't really done anything of significance with Lego for a long time. My cat Devastator the Terrible (not really her name) managed to destroy a good deal of my town and rail yards while i was ill so sometime soon I'm hoping to plan out how I might rebuild it. All my steam locos and rolling stock have survived just fine though which is the main thing.

I'm particularly keen on getting several of the painter/decorator minifig as he would be really great to use on some of the WIP areas of my layout; - especially in those places where I've had to temporarily substitute colours due to being short of the right coloured bricks.

Thanks for the additional background on Fabuland Pandora I'm not particularly keen on Duplo, - though I do have some of the Thomas the Tank Engine series. Duplo has it's place with its big chunky pieces and being intended for wee tots the big studs are ideal, BUT I personally much prefer Fabuland with its System compatible pieces and ability to be used with regular Lego bricks. I think the whole village community atmosphere of Fabuland is very appealing and I love the primary colours as well as the fantasy storybook design of the the door and window modules. A Fabuland car and scooter have already hit the streets of my still somewhat disorganised WIP Train/Town layout and none of the Friends minidolls or regular minifigs that live there seem to mind at all. Anyway for a while now a Fabuland bulldog minifig has been employed as an inspector on the railway that runs through the town and he seems to be doing a great job of keeping all the railway staff on their toes. Thanks too for pointing out the links to the Fabuland MOC and set review indexes. Seeing the MOCs left me wide-eyed and near speechless as they were some of the best custom work I've seen anywhere. Somewhat predictably the railway station is my favourite and already has me revising my plans for the main station on my layout. The set reviews were good to see too, - I'm in process of buying the Bakery set so once it arrives and I put it together I'll write a review to add to those already available.

That's why I wrote it as 'girls' themes. In quite a few places on the internet Fabuland is rightly or wrongly described as being a 'girls' theme which I know isn't accurate as Fabuland appeals to boys as much as it does the female gender. I checked that Police station wall piece and it is stickered as '64', my dodgy memory had it as being '63' for some unknown reason. I guess it makes sense to have the sticker numbers relating to the set numbers, but I must say that it does look like somebody in marketing had cold feet over putting a '69' sticker on the 3669 set

Well it seems that the '63' stickered wall piece is from the Police Station and the '5' stickered wall piece is from one of the funfair/amusement park sets. I should see if I can find enough parts to build up the Police Station since I will need one for my Fabuland suburb. I would imagine the Fabulanders don't want the Town Police guys poking their noses in should any crime breakout in their neighbourhood.

Fabulous! I don't know why I didn't think of looking on Bricklink. Thankyou very much for pointing me in the right direction

I've only just discovered just how fascinating a little world Fabuland is and while I'd had a few Fabuland bits and bobs in my storage boxes for some time that I'd picked up with various Lego joblots I'd never really given the theme much thought before. Strangely enough it was the Friends theme that led me to Fabuland as I started to become interested in what other 'girls' themes there had been before Friends. My present intention is to build a Fabuland suburb somewhere on my Train/Town layout and to that end I've been collecting up more Fabuland pieces, - especially house and building parts, - so I can make a start on putting something together. What my question is though is that I've noticed some of the wall sections will have a sticker with a number on them that looks a lot like a house number. One blue piece with yellow windows that arrived today has the number '5' on it and another wall piece which I can't just find at the moment has a sticker with '63' on it. So does Fabuland have streets with houses that have numbers as in, '5 Bulldog Street' or am I barking up the wrong tree? (Was that an unintentional pun? ) And my other question is that can these 'house numbers' be identified as to what set they might belong to? I've been trying to do what research I can, but so far I'm not coming up with anything. Theme crossovers can be fun though, my custom Olivia has been roaring around the place on a blue Fabuland motor scooter and having the time of her life. She feels very safe on the scooter because unlike the Lego bicycles that are available to her she can actually hold onto a Fabuland scooter's handlebars and doesn't have to worry about falling off because she can't steer properly.

Lovely to see a MOC of a traditional steam era signalbox. The green and tan colour scheme is an excellent choice too.

Agreed, - the saddle tank on an 'F' Class is a major challenge. So far I've chickened out with trying to build one.

It has crossed my mind to do something like that with Lego. I built a similar type of loco in 'G' to run on 45mm track back when I was still doing large scale scratchbuilding.

Stunning! I was very keen on the LMS as a teenager and despite being a steam loco only type of girl these two diesel locos made a rare impression on me. Another pair of model quality MOCs from the grand master and once more the bar has been raised again.

Thank you for the Brickshelf link, they are an amazing set of photos. I very much enjoyed seeing the earliest train related sets as I didn't know anything about them at all. So much blue track and in some ways the final cleanup picture where it all had to be taken apart again was a little sad.

What an exceptional model! Metro stations make unusual and fascinating subjects for a MOC and you've made an excellent job modelling this station.