[MOC] Agawa Canyon Tour Train

[Stereo]

In the broadest sense, this is modified from the set 60051 Passenger Train.  I wanted something more locally relevant, and the Agawa Canyon Tour Train has a fairly stylish livery.  So this is 6 by 30 stud cars all around.

Due to the train baseplates, bogie plates etc. available, I've chosen to build one locomotive and two passenger cars.  Typically the real train runs with 3 locomotives and around 15-20 passenger cars.  It runs a point to point route in Northern Ontario, including the namesake Agawa Canyon, and the remote destination is not much more than a washroom and some historical items from the railroad, so it runs locomotives at both ends and returns without turning around.

Most of the train is formerly Colorado Ski Train equipment, including the EMD F40PH locomotives and the passenger cars that match its paint scheme.

The front and rear of F40PH have a combination of angles that are a challenge to imitate in Lego, especially at 6 wide, so I've mostly stuck to what needed to happen to get the correct configuration of running lights.  The front has some tiles placed at funny angles, and the rear is built partly upside-down.  The windshield is snugly inserted without being connected to any studs, to get it at an angle. The real train's red is brighter and pinker, but not to the point of being Magenta, and that colour has less parts available, so I've built it in Dark Red.  The roof of the real locomotives is technically satin black, but in most photos it reflects the sky so strongly that I felt like Sand Blue was a reasonable substitute.

As you might have guessed from the IR dome, it's running Power Functions, and the rear half of the roof lifts off for access; the rearward ventilation fan can also be clicked to turn on the power brick, though there's no way to see whether it's on.

An interesting feature of the passenger cars is that they're designed to make stops at locations with no platform, so stairs lead right down to track level from each door.  Each car is named after a location in the area, which is what the red plate in the middle of the side represents.

One aspect I'm not really happy with is how tall the locomotive looks in direct side view.  The whole train's essentially a half-brick higher than it "should" be for how tall it is, because all the wheels are the same size and it's a little too large for the passenger cars in this scale.  I do have plans to take a crack at that; I'll post an update once I've tried them out and can comment on any problems and results.

I designed it in Studio, and found a couple issues when building it in bricks, so I should be able to post some low-effort instructions once I've synchronized.  It seems to be 95% fine with R40 track (sometimes it decouples through switches, I think because the trucks have the magnets mounted so far away), but I've photographed it on an R104 corner.

Here's a photo of the real train to give you an idea.

Descent to Montreal River by Billy Wilson, on Flickr

[dr_spock]

Nice work. Took the train a few years ago. There were some stairs to climb at the end of the line.

[zephyr1934]

Oh, the old Algoma Central is it? A great choice of roads to build (I've never been there but it always looks amazing in the photos). I have seen the Ski Train cars though, they've got the unusual disc brakes on the outside of the trucks, but that should make it easier for you to do custom wheels since you don't need a truck frame on the outside. Doing that with either standard technic axle train wheels or roller bearing wheels, you could replace the 6x28 train base with a single layer of normal plates and lower the top of the cars by one plate.

The build looks good. Snotted cheese bricks can also give a nice F40 nose in 6 wide, but then that messes up the striping (you can't have it all). Is the dark gray underframe critical to the locomotive? If not, that might be a spot to shorten the height. As it stands, the cars look well proportioned for keeping them to the train bases. I like the steps, I wonder though, what would the cars look like if you lowered the door window by one plate?

[Stereo]

1 hour ago, zephyr1934 said:

Oh, the old Algoma Central is it? A great choice of roads to build (I've never been there but it always looks amazing in the photos). I have seen the Ski Train cars though, they've got the unusual disc brakes on the outside of the trucks, but that should make it easier for you to do custom wheels since you don't need a truck frame on the outside. Doing that with either standard technic axle train wheels or roller bearing wheels, you could replace the 6x28 train base with a single layer of normal plates and lower the top of the cars by one plate.

The build looks good. Snotted cheese bricks can also give a nice F40 nose in 6 wide, but then that messes up the striping (you can't have it all). Is the dark gray underframe critical to the locomotive? If not, that might be a spot to shorten the height. As it stands, the cars look well proportioned for keeping them to the train bases. I like the steps, I wonder though, what would the cars look like if you lowered the door window by one plate?

I appreciate the reply! They're numbered Algoma Central (AC104 etc.) but owned by CN from what I understand.  Yeah, the brake discs are an interesting oddity.

The dark gray underside is more compromise to get the stripes to work.  I would say the approximate 'right' amounts are 4 plates of LBG on the cars, 1 plate LBG on the locomotive, but between the baseplate and profile bricks, the cars get 5, so the locomotive makes up the same stack as 2 LBG, 2 DBG, and 1 empty space instead of the bottom half of a train base, so the rear truck needs a black pin on tile to be inobtrusive.  It would be LBG, DBG, black, except I unexpectedly ran out of 1x8 or longer black plates.  If I do lower the cars, the upper layer of DBG will hopefully be easy to remove.

The door window has hollow studs on top that are used to revert the 1/2 stud offset, I'll see if I have any more dark red jumpers to try lowering it.  Though I'm a little worried about touching those windows, they were in sets in the brittle red/brown era and one of them's already shattered when being shipped to me.

Edited September 23, 2024 by Stereo

[Feuer Zug]

Nice consist you've built. Those stairs on the cars and the offset couplers give it an non-standard, but functional look. Well done.

[Darkkostas25]

Marvelous build! And informative! 

[Murdoch17]

Nice work @Stereo! I really like the way the stripes all lines up across the engine and cars - keep up the good work!

[Stereo]

I 3d printed smaller wheels a while ago but I wasn't entirely happy with them so I didn't get around to writing about them.

The problem mostly boils down to the 2mm hole used by RC train bogie axles being way too precise for the type of printing I used.  And then the parts are soft & the hole so small that my drill press can't clamp them or really deal with the delicacy of it.  So I ended up drilling them out to size by hand, and the drillbit didn't make clean holes.  Maybe catching on the layers or just not meant to drill into plastic?  So they ended up a bit loose by the time the axle was able to go into them straight.  Thus the flanges can get closer together than on the original wheels, and so in the right circumstances these wheels drop between the rails on corners.  I think the correct solution for this 3d printing quality is to design the wheels to be about a millimetre wider gauge than the originals.  So the pin on the outside of the wheel needs to be shorter, and the hole can be shallower.  The original wheels have quite a bit of side to side play within the track, so removing this play won't be an issue if a wheel happens to have a well-fitting hole.  Nonetheless, they work well enough to do laps around my layout.

I actually printed two sizes; 1/2 plate smaller radius (1 plate lower diameter) and 1 plate smaller radius.

These are the 1/2 plate kind, which I didn't end up needing as the smaller ones rolled okay, so I had a handful around to photograph.  The roundness is good, but angled surfaces which are unavoidable on train wheels make the prints a bit ugly.  I included a 6mm hex shape on the backside to help with fixturing them for sanding smooth, but it turned out this is the side that needed work so it didn't help.

Difference in height from new wheels (left) and original wheels (right) - it's really not as noticeable once the whole train's been converted, but put like this I think it explains itself fine.  The stairs are now less than half a plate above the rails.  I think they look fine in the original wheel parts, it just makes the trucks look longer, they don't look out of place.

It took me a little while to rebuild the locomotive lower so I didn't match photos all that well; here is the "before".

And here is "after" with the spacer layer removed from the locomotive.

 

Overall I'd say it accomplished my goal of improving the vertical proportions, but it was only necessary in the first place because of the ways I wanted the F40PH livery to be accurate - it would be a lot more sensible to just build the black and yellow stripes a plate higher, with this shorter locomotive design, and leave the cars running on original Lego wheels.  Sticking to original Lego 6 wide sizes makes it wrong in a familiar way so it doesn't really stand out.  The gap between the front end of the locomotive and the buffer is still bad, consequence of not using a train base.  The locomotive is 27 long plus 3 studs of diagonal parts, so it'd need a tiny stretch to use a 28 base.

I have higher resolutions on some of the images at https://bricksafe.com/pages/Stereog/agawa-canyon-tour-train

Edited November 10, 2024 by Stereo

[Celeste]

Looks fantastic! I really love the passenger cars and the loco is quite faithfully reproduced here. As a fellow 6w builder, I understand the constant struggles of proportions and details. I've been working on an A5s style switcher for ages, but can't get the height of the tender to be lower and still hold a battery box.

Out of curiosity, have you run tests of the new wheels vs stock Lego in terms of ride quality and friction?

[Man with a hat]

Looking good. Especially the front is nicely done. 

[Stereo]

20 hours ago, Celeste said:

Out of curiosity, have you run tests of the new wheels vs stock Lego in terms of ride quality and friction?

I did compare them, but not scientifically.  They are worse than regular metal axle wheels (coast about half as far after a 1 plate/16 stud slope) but still better than all-plastic ones.  They also bounce up and down a bit since the hole in the middle is loose.  The locomotive has the engine in the front so it sometimes slips pulling 2 of them on complicated track like multiple switches, would be better if it was under the battery box. With original Lego wheels it hasn't slipped but I've run it less configured that way.

Edited November 11, 2024 by Stereo

[zephyr1934]

Looking good.

 

FWIW, BBB offers x-small wheels, which I think are one plate smaller in diameter than the normal train wheels.

[LEGO Train 12 Volts]

Amazing train and nice small wheels!

 

[Celeste]

18 hours ago, zephyr1934 said:

Looking good.

 

FWIW, BBB offers x-small wheels, which I think are one plate smaller in diameter than the normal train wheels.

Train wheel size chart that might help if you want to switch from 3D printed to a 3rd party manufacturer, @Stereo.

[ILoveSeatron]

That train looks really cool!  I like how you did the angles on the loco. 

Edited November 15, 2024 by ILoveSeatron