Lego on Miek Gieben

LEGO Base Plates

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 07:59:30 +0000

Pile of LEGO base plates.

New LEGO City

Sun, 24 May 2020 16:18:20 +0000

I’m building a new LEGO city, here are some initial photos of what I’m building. The plan is to have a partly raised city where a train runs under it. There will be tunnel entrances. Where the trains comes out of the tunnel there will be a station or something.

And some more details for the station, including a door leading to somewhere…

Lego Track Ballasting

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 17:58:48 +0000

Many posts have been written on ballasting LEGO tracks. They all mention added ballast is “piece intensive”, and the examples I found online use a lot of LEGO pieces.

I still went ahead and I think I’ve found a variant that still looks good, and is (slightly) optimized to reduce the number of bricks. For straight track it consists out a two layers of plates. Curves and switches have 1 layer and need to be propped up with tiles (when attaching to baseplates).

LEGO Railroad

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 21:17:29 +0000

I’m building a LEGO railroad (all modular so I can tidy it up again). But this is the current work-in-progress state of it.

45° angle to have a mountain-like region.

Little bridge over some water.

Start of the ramp.

Rest of the ramp.

Wider shot of bridge and mountain.

Slightly more zoomed in.

LEGO Geometry

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 07:47:46 +0000

LEGO Geometry details the LEGO length L. Armed with this knowledge you can build better and more advanced LEGO models.

Appreciate any feedback and might eventually just put it on GitHub. The document is written in LaTeX (with LaTeX beamer).

Raised LEGO city

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 10:37:54 +0000

Finally got myself a table where I can build a LEGO city \o/. But it turned out to small to fit both a train track and a city layout, so I’m doing the next best thing: raising the entire city (18 base plates in total) to about 16 bricks height. This allows me run the train (well tube actually, now) under the city.

This post has some under construction photos from the first parts of the build (some things are already being redone).

Large Lego Station - update 1

Wed, 31 May 2017 22:03:26 +0100

You call this a station?

Lego set 60050.

Or this:

Lego set 7937.

This! Is! A! Station!

I tried to keep it light on Lego bricks, i.e. the platform’s foundations are pretty open, but there is still a ton of bricks used. Just for the panels I needed to order 100 black window frames (1x4x6).

Large Train Station Arch

Mon, 22 May 2017 09:09:46 +0000

I saw this video of a large LEGO train station and I liked the arch in there:

The use of curved train tracked is very neat. However it makes for a big build and I wanted to use something smaller: hence my design, which uses Technic beams.

LEGO Train Station Update 3

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 09:00:14 +0000

Finally getting really happy with my train station. The roofing above the platforms looks nice, considering it took about 4 tries it was about time. I still want add another (hotel) floor to the main building and redo the roof there a bit.

Station side.

Station front.

Station back.

Station overview.

Station building floors.

LEGO Train Station Update

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 08:11:14 +0000

An update on my LEGO train station. It is getting huge, four baseplates (including the station building itself).

Semi-happy with the roof and the transparant 1/4 cylinders.

Station photo #1.

Station photo #2.

Station photo #3.

Train Station MOC

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 19:07:21 +0000

I’m building a LEGO train station, and I’m trying out different designs. In the end the main building will look something like this LEGO ideas project, but currently I’m test-building the platform section (which is also modular-ish).

Station photo #1.

Station photo #2.

Station photo #3.

LEGO Vertical Lift Bridge

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 11:12:07 +0000

I’ve bought two LEGO 76057 sets and combined them to create a vertical lift bridge.

It still needs a load of finishing touches, but it is working, although the alignment of the towers and the lift element itself needs to be very precise.

Bridge from the side.

Bridge from above.

Enjoy some (wonky) videos of the whole contraption.

Hopper and Container Wagons

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 18:01:12 +0100

I’ve been playing around with LDD this weekend for a bit.

Via bricklink I’ve bought enough pieces to build a second goal hopper car:

Coal hopper from 60098.

Now these hopper cars are somewhat short, so I decided I need a longer version with a bogie on each end. After a couple of false starts this resulted in:

Hopper rendered view.

Some more images (that haven’t been rendered):

Hopper above view.

Hopper side view.

Hopper side/above view.

Also, intrigued by the Maersk train, I wanted to recreate the container wagon … (to build myself one day):

Train Buffer

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 08:00:55 -0700

This train buffer is a homage to the train buffer LEGO used in the 7777 ideas book.

Page 16 from the LEGO Idea Book.

I used some newer LEGO pieces, but tried to capture the old look. Also hope this is sturdy enough to actually stop a train.

Front of the train buffer.

Back of the train buffer.

Those in-LDD screenshots are pretty bad quality…

Building Inclines and Bridges

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 22:04:37 +0100

Referenced here as a kind of book mark:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080705054916/http://www.ngltc.org/train_depot/inclines.htm

Rules listed there:

Rule 1: The steepest slope should change the height by no more that 2 plates per piece of track.
Rule 2: The angle of the incline should change by no more that 1 plate per piece of track.
Rule 3: Don’t have points at an inclined angle, they need to be flat.
Rule 4: There should be at least one length of level straight track between any point and any inclined piece of track.

The exact brick count is as follows, where x.y means x bricks and y plates.

Building a Train Bridge

Sat, 25 Jun 2016 15:17:22 +0100

The LEGO arrived! My first ever designed LEGO build and it worked :)

Also I was right about those top beams, weird off-by-one error while putting it together, but it works perfectly. The whole thing it light and yet sturdy. And trains pass under and on it.

Shot of the LEGO bridge.

Train riding on the bridge.

Previous photo looks slightly different, found small piece that I though was missing and made the top beams more perfect.

Triangular Warren Truss Bridge in LEGO

Sun, 19 Jun 2016 12:27:12 +0100

Lately I have been playing around with LEGO (again). To pretend that I am an adult I’m designing models with Lego Digital Designer. It took some getting used to, but it is a nice tool. Also it runs perfectly in Wine (on my Mac running Linux).

I’m toying with a plan to build a LEGO train triangular Warren truss bridge.

Triangular Warren truss bridge: front view.

Not having build it, I can’t really say if a train passes under it (think it does), and if it is structurally sound (again I think so).