Hit the Road

Some welcome time off over Christmas and New Year gave me a welcome opportunity to crack on with my LEGO city layout after a hiatus of over three months. Last time I posted an update I had started to significantly modify 10224 Town Hall with a view to creating a St Pancras-inspired station building for the layout, with the front of one 'wing' of the building completed (picture below).

Progress on the station subsequently stalled due to a lack of dark orange bricks, but during the run up to Christmas I was able to pick up 31050 Corner Deli from Amazon at a substantial discount; this set contains a selection of dark orange bricks including the ones I was missing, and while I'm generally loathe to buy brand new sets and immediately cannabalise them for parts, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to get what I needed to progress the build without the hassle of putting together a Bricklink order. Mirroring the modifications that I'd previously made to the Town Hall was fairly straightforward once I had the necessary elements, and I was soon able to complete the front of my station building as you can see in the picture below. The trickiest part of the build was figuring out how to fashion the number '1968' on the roof ballustrade in the same style as the '2016' (the year I started the station build) and the '1891' (from the original Town Hall set). It took some trial and error, but I got there in the end, utilising a variety of SNOT techniques to get it right.

The station is still far from complete, of course - I haven't even decided what the back and sides will look like yet, much less started to source parts - but with the footprint and front largely finalised I was at least now in a position to start figuring out how the building would fit into my layout. As a reminder, the station has been designed to occupy the area marked out by the light blue box below, with a canopy of some description protruding from the back of the building and overhanging the track.

Before placing the station into position on the layout there were a couple of things I wanted to do. First I filled the vacant space to the right of Cafe Corner with another of my venerable old Modular Buildings, 10211 Grand Emporium from 2010; as stated in a previous update I'm planning to eventually populate the layout with a mixture of modified 'official' sets and buildings of my own design, but for now the official, unmodified Modulars will do just fine. With the Grand Emporium in place my next job was to construct a few sections of brick-built road to run between the pair of Modulars and the station. As detailed in an earlier update I'd previously decided on the specifications for my brick-built roads in terms of their width and overall appearance, and I'd also figured out how to integrate the roads with the surrounding buildings and other structures. It was therefore a relatively simple task to build some new sections of road to those specifications and drop them into place on the layout as you can see in the picture below.

In addition to building a couple of full-sized road sections (32 studs in length) I also needed to fashion a smaller section to serve as a junction between the new road sections and the older section of road to the left of Cafe Corner. I also tiled the area between and around the railway tracks to the left of the road junction so as to create a level crossing; this will require a barrier of some description, but that's a job for another day....

With the new road sections in place I carefully lowered the station building into position on the layout as you can see below. There's obviously still a lot of tidying up and landscaping to do around the edges, but it was nevertheless nice to see it in place. I was also relieved to discover that the station's considerable weight was adequately supported by the structures below such that the whole building didn't crash through to the lower level of the layout....

If you've been patiently following along with this project for a while now then you'll perhaps recall that the layout includes an underground track loop complete with an underground station platform (more details here if this is news to you). The underground platform sits directly beneath the station building, and the intent is to connect it with the surface via a pair of staircases which emerge from underneath the twin arches at the front of the station. You can just about see the staircases disappearing downwards beneath the arches in the picture below.

The image below, which is taken from behind the station building, shows one of the staircases starting to take shape. The plan is for both staircases to descend down to a common underground concourse featuring a ticket office and a number of ticket barriers, through which the minifigure population of my LEGO city can access the underground platform.

While the station undoubtedly looks imposing from the front, the rear view above provides a sobering reminder of how much work there is still to do on the left and right 'wings' of the building which are currently only half built. Even so, it feels good to have made some tangible progress and moved the project along a bit, as evidenced by the picture below.

I hope you enjoyed the update. Feel free to share any comments below, and I'll provide further updates in due course.

Previous MOC city layout update here.

Change of Plan ?

I've always found the phrase "The Devil finds work for idle hands" a bit creepy, but I have to admit that it can sometimes be true. Well, metaphorically at least.

You may recall that work on my LEGO City layout came to a grinding halt a month or so back as I was waiting on some specific pieces that I needed to proceed. Then came the frantic rush to complete a number of LEGO Star Wars UCS sets in time for the Brickish Association LEGO show at the UK National Space Centre. That's now done and dusted, however, so my mind has returned to the work at hand, namely making some progress on my City layout. Problem is, the awaited Light Bley bricks still haven't arrived, and thus my 'idle hands' have had to busy themselves with something else. More specifically, I've started to re-examine some of the layout design choices I made initially, and as a result experiment with some alternatives....

Firstly, the track layout. The original plan was to have a completely enclosed lower loop of track running within the lower level of the layout, with an independent upper loop of track plus sidings etc. running at ground level. Then some bright spark suggested that it would be really cool if there was some way of linking the lower and upper track loops together so that a train could travel between the lower and upper levels of the layout. While twiddling my thumbs waiting for my missing pieces to arrive, I started thinking this suggestion over, and decided that it would indeed be cool if I could carry this off. It was however quickly evident that it probably wouldn't be as simple as it sounded.... After picking the brains of a few people on the Brickset Forum, the consensus seemed to be that in order for a LEGO train to be able to reliably negotiate a gradient, it would be inadvisable for the track to rise by more than one plate in height for every standard section of track. Given that the upper level of my layout will be around 13 bricks higher than the lower level, that's nearly 40 track sections required to get a train from the lower level to the upper level. Still, I sensed a challenge, so got cracking trying to see how it might work, and you can see the results of my experiment below; click to enlarge the pics.

Before.......

......and after !

As you can see, a whole circuit of inclined track was required to raise the level by just 13 bricks ! The gradient looked pathetically shallow to me, and I initially thought that the "one plate per track section" advice would turn out to be too conservative, but I soon discovered that it was spot on - my Emerald Night struggled to negotiate the curved track sections at anything other than full speed due to insufficient traction between the wheels and the track. You can see Emerald Night hauling herself up and down the slope in the short video clip below.

In practice, Emerald Night won't be used on the lower section of track - she won't fit comfortably within the tunnels which will enclose the lower loop, and hence wouldn't have to negotiate the gradient anyway. My choice for the lower loop is the train from Set 7938 Passenger Train with a couple of extra coaches bolted on for good measure, and it's this train which would have to scale the gradient if I decide to go with it, so my next job is to unseal the box, build it, and see how it fares on the uphill section.

Set 7938 Passenger Train - my choice for the underground tunnels

Including a link between the track loops might seem like a good idea, but it would substantially impact the design of the layout above ground. As the train negotiates the gradient, more and more of it would appear above ground level, meaning that I'd need to somehow accomodate a cutting running pretty much the entire length of the uphill section. This in turn would dramatically reduce the usable area for building on at ground level unless I can find a way of adequately landscaping over the cutting and building on top. It seems a daunting prospect for a relatively modest reward, but I'll keep mulling it over, and if anyone has any good ideas then I'd be delighted to hear them....

The other potentially significant design change I've been contemplating concerns the road system at ground level. Early on during the design process, MOC builder extraordinaire legoloverman aka Pete asked me whether I'd be using brick-built roads in my layout. My response was that it'd be nice to do, but that I wanted to try and keep things relatively simple to start with so as to maximise my chances of actually getting the layout built. I won't quote his response here, but suffice to say he was not in agreement..... Even so, I went ahead with the plan to use standard LEGO road plates in my design (click pic below for a reminder).

I've recently started to question that decision, however. Occupying a maximum area of 2.25m x 1.25m, my layout really isn't that big, and use of road plates would I think waste precious space, particularly as a result of excessively wide pavement areas. Also, the road plates are very inflexible - if you don't want a straight, curve, 'T' junction or crossroads then tough..... Finally, brick-built roads would look less generic and, I suspect, just better full-stop (or 'period', if you're an American). So time for another experiment, then ! There are a number of useful resources on the Web for anyone considering brick-built roads, and a number of techniques from simple to highly complex (you can get a taste here). After some enjoyable messing around, the result of my road building experiment can be seen below (click pics to enlarge).

Experimenting with brick-built roads, with help from Green Grocer...

Emerald Night pays a visit

So will I change tack and use brick built roads instead ? Well, I'm not sure yet, to be honest - they certainly look good to me, and the section I attempted wasn't too hard to build or integrate with other aspects of the layout (although to be fair I haven't attempted to build a junction or a curve yet...). It would however require one hell of a lot of Dark Bley bricks, not to mention a handy number of white and yellow plates, all of which I'd have to source. I'm definitely leaning towards doing this, however....

And as for linking the upper and lower track loops ? Well, once again it's a nice idea, but I'm wary of the impact that this would have on my building area at surface level, so unless I or any of you can come up with a viable workaround I'll probably not run with this idea. We shall see !

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