The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 24 • June 2013 $8.95 in the US All Aboard the LEGO® Trains! Train Layouts by Cale Leiphart and PennLUG Building a Train Station Features Instructions AND MORE! 0 5 0 74470 23979 6 Issue 24 • June 2013 Contents From the Editor ...................................................2 People The Idea Book 6000 Experience: Building a Childhood Dream ...............4 Building Minifigure Customization 101: Customizing Your “Friends” ..................18 You Can Build It: Micro Monorail System ..........................22 The LEGO® The Lone RangerTM Constitution Train Chase: Building a Steam Train the LEGO Way!...............................................28 Powering The Lone Ranger Train .......31 You Can Build It: Train Station.....................................................36 Peter Norman: Building and Styling LEGO Trains .........................54 Community PennLUG: Taking Layouts to New Levels .................................................59 Designing the LEGO Monorail .............63 Building a Different LEGO Monorail .............................................65 Steven Walker: Disney -Inspired Building ......................66 Masao Hidaka: A Different Approach to the Monorail .............................................68 Joe Meno: Following and Innovating Monorail Design ..........................................70 Nathaniel Brill: Suspended Monorail Design .............72 A History of LEGO Trains ..........................74 Community Ads .............................................78 Last Word .............................................................79 AFOLs......................................................................80 1 Community The Idea Book 6000 Experience: Building a Childhood Dream Article and Photography by Brian and Sue Ann Carpignano [email protected] Additional Photos from Idea Book 6000 When I was a child in the ‘80s, I turned the pages of the LEGOLAND Idea Book (#6000) over and over again looking at all the great models and building ideas. I got to follow the photostory of two minifigures, Mary and Bill, which were pictured in the Idea Book. As I followed along with their adventures, the Idea Book provided building ideas of town, space and castle scenes. Mary, in her polka-dot shirt, and Bill, in his blue and white striped shirt, would be in all the scenes as their story unfolded in the pages of the Idea Book. The models of a snack shop, a hair salon, a grocery store, a circus, cool spaceships, and castles were enticing me to build. As a child, I attempted to create some of these models from the Idea Book. However, I had difficulty recreating many of them, especially the town models. My childhood collection of extra pieces did not allow the buildings to turn out quite right, as I did not have all the required elements, such as slope bricks and certain brick colors. When I decided to build the movie theatre pictured in the Idea Book, I used 2x4 red bricks for the roof and so I ended up Brian Carpignano’s initial building effort of the Idea Book’s movie theater. with jagged edges. Also, since I did not have sufficient minifigure-scale windows and doors, I substituted them with older style windows and doors. Having lost the stickers to the theatre, I ended up cutting out the images of the stickers from the Idea Book and used scotch tape to stick them on the model. 4 As time progressed, the evolution of LEGO pieces made it even more difficult to recreate many of the models shown in this Idea Book. Many of the older pieces were either no longer manufactured by LEGO or rare in the newer sets. However, starting a few years ago, with the internet and a marriage to someone who was as enthusiastic about LEGO bricks as I was, a dream was to become a reality. Mary and Bill’s story could be told again. My building spree restarted about 3 or 4 years ago. My dream was launched with the building of Mary and Bill’s first house pictured in the Idea Book. Its success convinced my wife and me to continue building more of the town from the Idea Book. Since my wife and I were planning to attend Bricks by the Bay 2010, a LEGO fan convention in Fremont, California, we thought this house along with an entire scene could be a fun adventure to put together. We brought one of the town scenes to the event and received positive responses from the attendees as they reminisced on their younger years of LEGO building. Encouraged by our initial success, we began to build more of the town Driving through the hills of the layout. After scenes. We continued making the town buildings and many of the vehicles, building several of the scenes including this one, incorporating them in several shows that our local LEGO club participated we discovered the Idea Book used only curve, straight, and T-intersection base plates. There in. We did not have a display ready for Bricks by the Bay 2011, this time in was no usage of the crossroad base plates even Santa Clara, California, but decided we could aim to have a full-fledged layout though they were introduced as set number 6304 completed in time for the Bricks by the Bay 2012. We started planning a layout in 1980 when the Idea Book was published. for the “Large Displays” category. One of the criteria for a large display was My guess was that the Idea Book was probably that it tell a story. We decided to only focus on the town scenes – our goal was designed in parallel with new sets and new to create a layout that would encompass all of the major town scenes so that the pieces, and the book was not updated in time to viewing public could walk around the layout in a sequential storyline, just like include building ideas using these newly released crossroad base plates/pieces. turning the pages of the Idea Book. We focused on building eleven main scenes from the book. To help with the storytelling, we copied pictures from the actual Idea Book and created what we thought Mary may have written in her diaries while venturing through town. We got this storyline by viewing the smaller vignettes in the Idea Book. The pictures from the eleven main scenes were laminated and placed on stands created out of LEGO bricks. This made it possible for the convention attendees and the public to read Mary’s “handwritten” diaries from the 1980s as they walked around the display. Picture from our layout (left), showing our LEGO card stand with 2x2 bricks in the order of the 1964 LEGO logo (above). In the next few pages, follow our story as we build the models of the Idea Book and you might discover some new building techniques and some Lego history too. Also, if you are like us and want to reproduce these Idea Book models as closely as possible, we will show some of the details as we saw it. E-mail us at [email protected] to tell us what you have discovered. 5 In the 1980s, LEGO created 2x2 bricks that could light up, which were powered by 4.5V batteries. The small building with the blue roof is actu- ally a battery box to illuminate the taxi transparent building sign and the inside of the taxi building. Also, lights were placed inside the wind- mill hotel. Idea Book Photo Building the windmill hotel was extremely fun. The hardest part of the building was the roof since the photographs in the Idea Book did not This scene also showed a colorful set of international flags lining the street. The flags are white flag pole show you a top-down view. The roof pieces with stickers for each country. The stickers did not come with the Idea Book and came with an is dome-shaped and built with stag- old accessory set 940. You can find scans of the flag stickers at Bricklink by searching for set 940. gering red bricks. 9 Building Minifig Customization 101: Customizing Your “Friends” by Jared K. Burks Hello all, as some of you might know I have a 4-year-old daughter, Branwen. She is always following me into my LEGO space and has started to “build” her own custom figures. Her interest in my hobby is quite endearing; as she builds her figures she even gives them a detailed backstory. Because she has been helping me make custom figures, I decided to make a special figure for her. Therefore, for this issue I’ll demonstrate how I made her custom figure of choice. Branwen asked for Tinker Bell from the Disney Fairy films. When I started thinking about this project and how I was going to capture Tink, I immediately went to the LEGO series 8 Collectible Minifigure Fairy. In this figure LEGO has given me wings, similar hair, and a skirt (which leaves me to wonder about the inspiration for this figure, but I digress). So I asked myself how the figure I was going to create would be significantly different from the LEGO S8 Fairy. I wanted some time to think about the creation I wanted to make for my daughter, so I watched a Tinker Bell film with her. The longer I watched, the more I came to the Want more of Jared K. Burk’s amazing realization that the LEGO Friends figures would be perfect to capture Tinker Bell. The minifigure customization ideas? Don’t proportions are nearly identical (large head, small body, thin arms, etc.) to the Tinker miss Minifigure Customization: Bell Disney Fairy (as portrayed in the film) character, with the only variance from the Populate Your World! (available shape and style between the two being the feet. In the film, Tink’s feet are extremely now at www.twomorrows.com) and tiny, whereas Friends figures have huge feet to accept a LEGO stud. This is a fixed its just-announced sequel (shipping in November 2013).