LEGO Trains 2022

[*thomas*]

No, I didn't forget about inflation. It's exactly why I said trains NOW are cheaper. 

[Kalahari134]

4 hours ago, Aanchir said:

60198 also had quite a few substantial side builds! I feel like the contents of the first couple booklets (the forklift, armored truck, drivers, and pallet of gold and banknotes) would easily have cost somewhere between $25 and $30 if they'd been sold as a set of their own. So the lower price could also be due to having fewer side builds like that. I guess we won't know for sure until more details emerge.

If it means no helicopter, I'm not complaining. 

[JopieK]

On 2/19/2022 at 11:45 PM, *thomas* said:

No, I didn't forget about inflation. It's exactly why I said trains NOW are cheaper. 

Ah that is what you meant. I hate the most that in the 12V gray era we had remote controlled turnouts and that we did not have any after that anymore. Guess they also won't come for a while as there are no chips available to make any :s

[XG BC]

29 minutes ago, JopieK said:

Ah that is what you meant. I hate the most that in the 12V gray era we had remote controlled turnouts and that we did not have any after that anymore. Guess they also won't come for a while as there are no chips available to make any :s

is there really a need for chips in these turnouts though? the 12v ones certainly didnt have any.

[Toastie]

1 hour ago, XG BC said:

is there really a need for chips in these turnouts though?

There is none. But people tend to forget that there was a time before chips. You know, the wired stuff and all that.

Best
Thorsten

[Maple]

On 2/19/2022 at 5:45 PM, *thomas* said:

No, I didn't forget about inflation. It's exactly why I said trains NOW are cheaper. 

Are you adding in the cost of batteries?

[dr_spock]

Rechargeable batteries are cheaper now too. Amazon Basic AAA rechargeable batteries are around $1 each.  In the early 2000s,  I was paying around $4 each for a no name brand rechargeable AAA.

 

 

[XG BC]

9 hours ago, Toastie said:

There is none. But people tend to forget that there was a time before chips. You know, the wired stuff and all that.

Best
Thorsten

true true. eventhough i was born in the early 2000s a time where chips were becomming more widespread it wasnt nearly as bad as it is today. take cars for example: todays cars are rolling computers with all their driver aids and sensors. the only chips my car has are the most basic ones for esp and abs and for the stereo. everything related to driving is mechanical otherwise. was one of the last cars to use a throttle cable instead of an electronic one.

[JopieK]

11 hours ago, Toastie said:

There is none. But people tend to forget that there was a time before chips. You know, the wired stuff and all that.

Best
Thorsten

It depends on how you want to use them. The 12V remotes did not need any IC's of course, the system worked quite well, but if you want to remotely control it wirelessly or via DCC...

[Lok24]

39 minutes ago, JopieK said:

..... but if you want to remotely control it wirelessly...

Which means a battery-pack at each switch, and power them all up manually ? WLAN ?

 

[*thomas*]

I just made a basic calculation of what prices would be like if inflation would be applied.

Like I said, the metroliner was a 6000 BEF set (150€) when it came out. That would be 290€ in today's money (93% inflation).

I have some catalogues with prices from the 80s, but that would be even worse. So even when you would factor in costs like metal track and a speed regulator, pricing on LEGO hasn't gone up the way we often belief they have.

 

[Maple]

53 minutes ago, *thomas* said:

 pricing on LEGO hasn't gone up the way we often belief they have.
 

And neither have wages. 
Inflation is a joke. Things cost more and more but I don't get paid more and more. More so in the USA where I live in a state where thankfully wages are not a slave wage of $7.25 an hour, but they don't keep up with inflation.

And LEGO should be cheaper today then 20+ years ago. LEGO now uses dyes and worst types of plastic. Their quality has gone the drain. They use 95% stickers in sets instead of 95% prints. LEGO also fired large amount of workers and replaced them with robots.

[*thomas*]

1 hour ago, Maple said:

And neither have wages. 
Inflation is a joke. Things cost more and more but I don't get paid more and more. More so in the USA where I live in a state where thankfully wages are not a slave wage of $7.25 an hour, but they don't keep up with inflation.

And LEGO should be cheaper today then 20+ years ago. LEGO now uses dyes and worst types of plastic. Their quality has gone the drain. They use 95% stickers in sets instead of 95% prints. LEGO also fired large amount of workers and replaced them with robots.

How they achieve their price setting doesn't matter. And I can only account for the region I live in, where wages have also increased when comparing them to 30 years ago. 

[Maple]

3 minutes ago, *thomas* said:

How they achieve their price setting doesn't matter. And I can only account for the region I live in, where wages have also increased when comparing them to 30 years ago. 

It's why I believed LEGO was cheaper in the USA until like 3-4 years ago.

1992 minimum wage was raised to $4.25, that be $8.50 today.
Before that it was like $3.35 in 1982, that's close to $9.
Minimum wage is $7.25 still. And we have to pay for death care that we call health care.

LEGO is cheaper, but cheaper isn't always better. Plus should be cheaper as quality control sucks, robots instead of humans, stickers instead of prints and plastic track instead of plastic and metal.

[JopieK]

7 hours ago, Lok24 said:

Which means a battery-pack at each switch, and power them all up manually ? WLAN ?

 

Well (I teach Embedded Systems), there are many possibilities, e.g. ZigBee, LoRa, Bluetooth Low Energy (it promises meshed networks). WiFi would be possible indeed, but would arguably not be the best choice. You could power a switch using a coin cell, if it only actuates now and then you will have decent battery life.

Some time ago I made a signal, back in the day they made signals in such a way that when the polarity is reversed the other LED will light (a LED is a diode which is basically an electrical version of a one way 'street'), but if you want e.g. more realistic behavior like flashing green and/or add orange (you need that for e.g. Dutch signals but in other countries like Germany it is even much more complicated). Even to make the lamp configuration of the Swiss Crocodile train more realistic it would be easiest to have a microcontroller, they are so cheap and small that analog electronics almost always has more con's than pro's (apart from the chip problem)).

[XG BC]

call me old shool but i prefer the wired aproach. what you could do is have multiple switches be controlled by one controller and then have that wirelessly communicate. would remove the need for chips in each switch. besides cable lengt issues there are no downsides to this approach.

[Toastie]

15 hours ago, XG BC said:

the only chips my car has are the most basic ones for esp and abs and for the stereo. everything related to driving is mechanical otherwise.

Well, I was born in the early 1960's ... and our first car was a 1972 Renault 5, we got in 1983. As far as I can tell, there were absolutely no chips in that car. And fixing things was more or less a question of "mechanical parts availability" and tools. It all changed, when I installed a Blaupunkt digital radio and some 25 cm diameter loudspeakers in the rear 

ESP and ABS were not invented back then, I believe.

Best,
Thorsten 

[Aanchir]

9 hours ago, Maple said:

And LEGO should be cheaper today then 20+ years ago. LEGO now uses dyes and worst types of plastic. Their quality has gone the drain. They use 95% stickers in sets instead of 95% prints. LEGO also fired large amount of workers and replaced them with robots.

Regarding stickers, keep in mind that a lot of the time stickers appear in addition to, rather than in place of, printed elements. Often a lot of the unique printed elements that LEGO produces are put towards minifigures, animals, and accessories, which is part of why sets without minifigures like the Super Mario sets, Saturn V Rocket, Typewriter can have so many printed bricks.

But there's never been a time when LEGO would have been able to print all those parts that they currently print AND all the ones that they currently use stickers for. The reason they were able to print all the decorated elements in, say, the M:TRON sets is that only 12 new-for-1990 printed elements appeared across that entire subtheme (one minifigure torso and 11 other parts)! By comparison, there are 12 new-for-2022 printed elements in this year's City Hospital, and stickers for an additional 12 elements!

Needless to say, printing every decorated element in every set from every theme set would be a quick way to drive the number of individual LEGO elements in production back up to the wildly unsustainable levels they were at back in the early 2000s, when LEGO was losing money on nearly all their sets and very nearly had to declare bankruptcy because of those sorts of out-of-control costs.

And in any case, LEGO train sets in particular often made extensive use of stickers even in the 70s and 80s. So bringing up stickers as a reason you think LEGO sets today are overpriced doesn't seem very applicable to this particular thread.

[XG BC]

7 hours ago, Toastie said:

Well, I was born in the early 1960's ... and our first car was a 1972 Renault 5, we got in 1983. As far as I can tell, there were absolutely no chips in that car. And fixing things was more or less a question of "mechanical parts availability" and tools. It all changed, when I installed a Blaupunkt digital radio and some 25 cm diameter loudspeakers in the rear 

ESP and ABS were not invented back then, I believe.

Best,
Thorsten 

funnily enough my car is also a renault though a renault kangoo phase I. abs i think was optional in 83 but only in high end cars.

[*thomas*]

Just to clear up things, with stating the fact that LEGO has not increased it's prices (for trains) in a way they could have, I agree with most fans on here that I would gladly pay more for metal track and a controller, same goes for curves with a wider radius and (if metal track is not an option), rechargeable battery packs.

But, we have quite a few options to solve those problems (third party companies are creating/selling - metal - track, there's an array of cheap plastic track with other radii and you can buy rechargeable battery packs from the East for cheap replacing a bunch of AAA batteries). Still, a lot of us are reluctant when it comes to buying non-LEGO whereas people that own non-LEGO model trains often give themselves the freedom to look elsewhere.

[Tcm0]

Where is the problem with automated switches? There are many instructions on how to build them with normal motors and bricks for the current switches. There is simply no need for an extra motorized one.

[Lok24]

8 minutes ago, Tcm0 said:

Where is the problem with automated switches? There are many instructions on how to build them with normal motors and bricks for the current switches. There is simply no need for an extra motorized one.

One ist the power supply, the other that the LEGO motrors aren't that small. And how they should be controlled.
No problems, just questions ;-)

[Tcm0]

5 minutes ago, Lok24 said:

One ist the power supply, the other that the LEGO motrors aren't that small. And how they should be controlled.
No problems, just questions ;-)

The 12V switch motors weren't small either. I think that the solutions are pretty comparable.

The type of control is a question of preference. Often a technic hub can be a good option that's hidden somewhere. Switches rarely appear individually and you can use the ports for sensors as well ;)

[Lok24]

27 minutes ago, Tcm0 said:

Often a technic hub can be a good option that's hidden somewhere. Switches rarely appear individually and you can use the ports for sensors as well ;)

Yes. Please send me 6 extension cables 40cm ..... ;-)
And for tracks just on the floor: there is no slot to get the cables underneath...

 

[dr_spock]

16 hours ago, Toastie said:

Well, I was born in the early 1960's ... and our first car was a 1972 Renault 5, we got in 1983. As far as I can tell, there were absolutely no chips in that car. And fixing things was more or less a question of "mechanical parts availability" and tools. It all changed, when I installed a Blaupunkt digital radio and some 25 cm diameter loudspeakers in the rear 

ESP and ABS were not invented back then, I believe.

Best,
Thorsten 

My 1988 Nissan had chips but no ESP or ABS.  ABS was me pumping the brakes.  I found out that brine water and chips don't mix.  NIssan installed the engine controller under the passenger seat with no waterproofing.  Needlessly to say the chips corroded off the circuit board when brine water got in there.

It's probably better for your body to walk over and throw the LEGO switch than pressing a button.  Muscles use them or lose them.