Irish Rail 29000-class commuter train

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

Just short of a year in the making - I first started the design in stud.io on 31 May last year - I've finally built the Irish Rail commuter in-the-brick.

It took two evenings of building, with a few tweaks required from the original stud.io file. The main change from the original stud.io came before my last Bricklink orders, when I found out the price and limited availability of 1x2x3 train windows in white, of which I needed 16. The doors now use a SNOT technique with brick-built windows.

It's my first ever train MOC - I'd never owned a Lego train until Argos had a deal on 60197 last summer! So I'm delighted with how this turned out and frankly astonished that it runs smoothly.

Building in 7-wide was easier than I expected. Needed an awful lot of 2x3 plates to reinforce the roof but surprisingly few jumper plates! It's a nice scale - I think I would have had to compromise on a lot of detail if I'd tried to squeeze it into 6-wide.




Here you can see the colour variation in lime parts - I'd heard about that in reviews of the Technic Lamborghini Sian - but unless you're studying this extremely closely it's not too noticeable.


There's only a one-stud gap between the carriages. I was worried that they'd collide on the sharp Lego R40 curves but surprisingly there's plenty of room!



There's also a video of it running here - unfortunately embedded videos from Flickr don't seem to work in the forum.

There are more photos in the album on Flickr.

[John]

From a distance it looks fab ,the non use of stickers and going brick is a bit gappy but at this scale it's amazing and the newly formed 7wide fraternity will be hailing you as their new leader

[David]

Really super build Tom! I think you've captured the livery without stickers as good as could be done. Is 7 wide more realistic regarding the wheels of real trains or less - any idea? By the way, the third picture's trans black panel window looks like it got hit by a beer bottle over the weekend. Very realistic.

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

From a distance it looks fab ,the non use of stickers and going brick is a bit gappy but at this scale it's amazing and the newly formed 7wide fraternity will be hailing you as their new leader

Yeah I prefer little gaps to decals like some of the wider Lego train community seem to use! Always fun trying to build around some awkward patterns anyway, for some reason I love doing it, for the same reason as I like doing brick-built writing I suppose.

Really super build Tom! I think you've captured the livery without stickers as good as could be done. Is 7 wide more realistic regarding the wheels of real trains or less - any idea? By the way, the third picture's trans black panel window looks like it got hit by a beer bottle over the weekend. Very realistic.

Apparently the wider the better! Having tracks as wide as the train is very unrealistic, I'm not sure what exactly the optimum train width is for realism of gauge but it's probably more like 8 or 9-wide. But then the train would have to be longer to compensate, and the sharp bends would look even more ridiculous :D

[David]

I have seen 8 or maybe they were 9 wides and thought they looked silly to be fair but this 7 wide seems perfect and even better now knowing that the body should be wider than the wheels.

[Tom a.k.a. eastawat]

Yeah I think once you go that wide you're really getting out of scale with minifigs and getting into that dangerous 8-wide car territory!

[lisaloveslego]

That's brilliant Tom.