English Electric

I have two motors under each power car of a 10-car Horizon Express. I opened the motors up and swapped the wires over on one bogie for each power car to remove the need to have a polarity switch.

For info, the Intercity 125 coaching stock is not sliding door, they are slam door stock with central locking. Fantastic model by the way, you've captured the look perfectly! It would look awesome with a few more carriages!

I can vouch for the quality of decals produced by JopieK, they really are as good as Lego produced decals, and Johan will do custom stickers. I had him produce the TGV sets for the Horizon Express and they look great, I believe they are on general sale in his website now.

One of the main reasons I would rather use the AAA battery packs is that they are effectively better 'future proofed' than the rechargeable packs. In 20 years time will the rechargeable packs still be going strong, or will they have died by then? At least with the AAA packs when the rechargeable batteries have past their best they can simply be exchanged at little cost.

After reading this thread in August I went online and bought 60 eneloop AAA batteries, I have to say I'm very impressed with them. On the website I bought from there were bundle deals where you could buy the genuine eneloop charger complete with 4 batteries for only a small amount more than just buying the batteries, so I got a couple of the chargers and them seem to work well

Sorry for rambling on, I took a good look at the truck tonight and decided it needed re-doing, I decided to base it on this Heanor unit:

Cab now shortened back by one stud, I'm happier with the look. I've also re-addressed the exhaust to make it less basic, and deleted the second exhaust in lieu of fitting an engine air intake...

Thanks for the feedback, I see what you mean with the cab depth, I will have a look to see if I can improve it. As for loco width, the gauge profile in the UK is fairly small so I don't think width difference would look too bad, here is a UK class 47 on a 12 axle trailer, it's actually narrower than the trailer. This is 12 axles long, I went for 9 as it will I think suit Lego loco lengths better.

The reason the trailer has so many axles is due to the load being carried. Even UK locos (small by worldwide standards) can weigh in excess of 130 tonnes. Here is an example similar to my design but with a shorter trailer for a smaller load... Here's one with a 9 axle trailer... Ultimately they are configurable to load length, weight, etc...

Ok,had a total re-design of the trailer, and several mods to the truck. The aux engine to run the trailer is now part of the trailer, and there is a long range fuel tank mounted behind the cab. The trailer wheels I realised were too big compared to the truck, and made the loco area high, hence the total re-make. I also corrected an error on the truck where the front panel was sitting too low leaving a gap under the windscreens, see what you reckon...

Thanks for the comments, I've done a fair few alterations today, but still a work in progress. I will look at the cost of building through the week!...

My sons main lego interest is usually lego trains, and he asked me to make him a truck for towing trains around on, here is the LDD result, I'm pretty happy with it and am now being pestered to get the bricks to build it! Let me know what you think... Dave

Does it go all the way through, could it be to stop children choking on it if it was swallowed?

Correct, all older UK 3rd rail loco's have long since been withdrawn from service/scrapped. There used to be class 70 and 71 which were straight 3rd rail electric loco's, and some 71's were rebuilt as Electro-diesels, being reclassified as class 74. Of these I think only one class 71 is preserved. On the subject of yellow loco's, this is the chosen colour for all of Network Rail's loco fleet (UK rail infrastructure owner).

I will build the two extra engines and I am going to fit TGV decals to all four engines, one pair with the earlier TGV logos and one with the later ones... Here is the basic train in 1+8+1 (with a few minor bits missing that my son has got "somewhere"!), I have ordered all the parts for the roof, skirt and bogie mods so await their arrival!