The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 46 • July 2017
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Building LEGO Trains! ®
Launching Brick Model Railroader PennLUG’s Train Displays Cale Leiphart’s Trains!
Japan Brick Fest 2016 Chris McKay Talks About The LEGO® Batman Movie ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-076-2 ISBN-10: 1-60549-076-8 50895
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Issue 46 • July 2017
Contents
From the Editor....................................................2
People
Helen Sham: Small Bricks, Big Figs.......................................3 Of Bats and Bricks: A Talk with Chris McKay, Director of The LEGO Batman Movie..........................9 Karen Metz: Reflections from an Artist.........................14 Berthil van Beek’s Great Ball Adventure...................................18
Building
Sentinel Approaching!..................................24 You Can Build It: Hyperion Class Cruiser...............................28 Minifigure Customization 101: Large Figure Conversion, Part 1.............32 BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art: Bat-Train............................................................36 You Can Build It: Railroad Hand Car........................................40 The Norfolk and Western Big Steam Freight Haulers: Class A and Y6b.............................................46 Taking LEGO Trains Farther: Sound........51
Community
Building an New LEGO Train Publication: Brick Model Railroader...............................54 The PennLUG Lines - Trains and More!..58 All Aboard the Advertising Train!.............61 Event Report: Japan Brick Fest 2016......68 Community Ads...............................................78 Last Word.............................................................79 AFOLs....................................................................80 If you’re viewing a Digital Edition of this publication,
PLEASE READ THIS: This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from another website or torrent, go ahead and read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal download, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications enough to download them, please pay for them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be downloaded within our Apps and at
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From the Editor: We went back to trains! Why? Well, people asked about a train issue, and we have one issue that spotlighted trains, but it became apparent that there was more demand.
July 2017 Issue 46
Publisher John Morrow
Editor in Chief Joe Meno
Photography Editor Geoff Gray Proofreader John Morrow
Japanese Bureau Editor Nathan Bryan West Coast Editors Todd Kubo Ashley Glennon
LEGO Ideas Correspondent Glen Wadleigh
Contributors: Jared Burks, Berthil van Beek, Christopher Deck, Will Galbraith, Matthew Hocker, Glenn Holland, Takamichi Irie, Cale Leiphart, Chris McKay, Karen Metz, Henry Pinto, Helen Sham, Tommy Williamson, Geoff Zhang, and Greg Hyland. Many thanks to the websites who have served as mirrors for BrickJournal:
Also, a website for train builders was launched: Brick Model Railroader! This site was launched by one of the best steam train builders out there, Cale Leiphart. He helped me out on the last train issue, so I asked him to work on another train issue with his site included. He was happy to do that and also got some great articles on other train stuff—including instructions to make a hand car! There’s some other fun articles too—take a look at the sized-up minifigures of Helen Sham or the interview with Chris McKay, director of The LEGO Batman Movie. There’s a lot to read, so have fun and build on! Joe Meno, Editor P.S. Have ideas or comments? Drop me a line at admin@brickjournal.com. I’m open to suggestions and comments and will do my best to reply. P.P.S... Yes, BrickJournal has a website — www.brickjournal.com! Twitter? Yep, there too — http://twitter.com/brickjournal. Facebook? Yup — http://www.facebook. com/group.php?gid=58728699914&ref=mf. Or you can scan the bottom codes with a QR reader! P.P.P.S. If you want info on a subscription, you can go to: http://twomorrows.com/ index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=78&products_id=616 or scan below! Website
Subscriptions
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About the Cover: Cale Leiphart’s Class A and y6b. Photo provided by Cale Leiphart. About the Contents: The Monkey King, built by Helen Sham Photo provided by Helen Sham.
Glossary AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) AFFOL (Adult Female Fan of LEGO) TFFOL (Teen Female Fan of LEGO) NLSO (Non-LEGO Significant Other) MOC (My Own Creation) TLG (The LEGO Group) BURP (Big Ugly Rock Piece) LURP (Little Ugly Rock Piece) POOP (Pieces—that can be or should be made—Of Other Pieces)
SNOT (Studs Not on Top) LUG (LEGO Users Group) LTC (LEGO Train Club) MECHA (a large armored robot on legs, typically controlled by a pilot seated inside) MECH (a large piloted combat robot) DARK AGES (usually teen years, when you drift away from building) STUDS OUT (building where the studs on bricks face the viewer)
LEGO®, TECHNIC, MINDSTORMS, Belville, Scala, BIONICLE, ExoForce, Mars Mission, World City, and other LEGO theme lines are trademarks of the LEGO Group of companies. All articles, photos, and art are copyright BrickJournal Media, LLC 2011, TwoMorrows Publishing and the respective writers, photographers, and artists. All rights reserved. All trademarked items are the property of their respective owners and licensees. Subscriptions are $60 Economy US, $70 Expedited US, $97 International, or $23 Digital Only and can be purchased at www.twomorrows.com or payment sent to: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. The editorial/advertising office address for BrickJournal is: BrickJournal Editor, 5610 Briar Oak Lane #510, Raleigh, NC 27612 USA or admin@brickjournal.com. First Printing. Printed in China. ISSN 1941-2347.
BrickJournal and its staff would like to thank the LDraw community for the software it makes available to the community, which we use for making all of the instructions and renderings in this magazine. We would especially like to thank Kevin Clague for his continued upgrades of the LPub tool that is a part of2the LDraw suite. For more information, please visit http://www.ldraw.org.
People
Helen Sham:
Small Bricks, Big Figs! 3
Helen Sham is literally a minifgure builder. For the past couple of years, her sized-up versions of minifigures have been seen and bought online by builders and collectors. Her Facebook page, Small Bricks Big World, is where she shares her models, both in progress and completed. Her portfolio is varied and mirrors the whimsy and design of the original minifigures she references. BrickJournal was able to talk to her about her work and, well, her work.
What do you do outside the hobby? Helen’s first build.
I was a graphic designer and photographer in Hong Kong with over 20 years of work experience. My projects included commercial packaging like boxes, wrappers, posters, greeting cards, and other commercial products. Before I moved to Taiwan, I owned a studio in Hong Kong for 5 years where I produced portraits, wedding photographs and graphics. It was a challenging and satisfying job as I needed to customize each job to fulfill my customers’ needs. I would spend hours to edit or decorate photos for a special request and I also drew cartoon portraits. The happy faces of my customers were my motivation and reward.
The initial group of scaled-up minifigures.
About 18 months ago, I moved to Taiwan in search of a new career path. One afternoon, I was watching television and a Ghostbusters movie trailer came on, which stimulated my creative juices. I spent two days to design the iconic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters with LEGO bricks, and the outcome was surprisingly good. One of my good friends is a collector of LEGO minifigures, such as those wearing rabbit, piggy, and monkey costumes. These minifigures made me wonder, “How cute would it be if I could enlarge them?” I began to design my first 25 cm tall LEGO figure which was a LEGO figure in a bumblebee costume. Since then, I have created many new designs and posted my designs on social media. I received many inquires about my figures and requests for instruction manuals, so I opened a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/smallbricksbigworld) to better communicate with all the LEGO fans around the world.
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I post my designs online and I sell LEGO pieces with instruction manuals. This is, at the moment, my full-time job. So basically, my hobby is also my career.
When did you start building? This is a good question; I started building things at an early age (around five or six years old), when I received a big box of LEGO from an uncle as a present. I would spend hours and hours working on it. I can’t remember exactly what kind of vehicle it was anymore. Soon after I completed it, I disassembled it and used all those LEGO pieces to build my own toys, which included airplanes, houses, race cars, etc... As I grew up, I left my LEGO pieces behind... until a couple years ago. Initially, like many others, I purchased and assembled different LEGO sets that were available on the market. This all changed when I walked by a store which sold LEGO individual pieces...
The God of Wealth and Santa Claus.
It was incredible! I didn’t realize that I could purchase parts to build my own creations! That was the very first time I heard of “My Own Creation” (MOC), although I have been producing my own creations for such a long time! With all those LEGO parts I could purchase, my building possibilities were endless. I officially stepped on my MOC path.
What are your favorite themes? My favorite themes include LEGO’s Star Wars and the Superheroes series. I have a large collection of LEGO’s products, many of which include Star Wars, LEGO City, Marvel and DC Superheroes, LEGO Creator, and Technic box sets.
When did you start building large minifigures? About two years ago, I found a LEGO 3723 minifigure online; this was just a simple minifigure with a red shirt, overalls and a cap. This inspired me to create a 50 cm tall LEGO version of “Me”. That became my first official MOC build. Later on, I designed a few other custom creations: a mini friend, a mini dog, together with a Vespa motor scooter. Helen’s first official MOCs.
These creations were so successful that I received many compliments. It’s a huge encouragement to continue challenging myself to make more new designs.
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People
Karen Metz with some of her work.
Karen Metz:
Reflections from an Artist Article and Photography by Karen Metz
I only really discovered the joys of creating with LEGO three years ago. I never had LEGO growing up, so my “Dark Ages” spanned most of my life. Shocking, I know. The only building toy I had was a box of Tinker Toys, which is funny because my husband jokingly refers to me building things with LEGO as playing with Tinker Toys. I did get to play with LEGO occasionally as a kid whenever I visited my cousin’s house, but that was pretty infrequent. I have three kids, who are now adults, and they had some Duplo, the first wave of the LEGO Harry Potter sets, and a few other sets from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The sets were not kept intact but were taken apart by them to create whatever they felt inspired to do. Eventually their LEGO was put away in a storage bin when they got older and stopped playing with them. A tradition at Christmas in our family is to put together a puzzle, and instead of getting another jigsaw puzzle three Christmases ago, I decided to get the Expert Creator Mini Cooper for us all to do. This is what ignited my interest in LEGO. The set was so much more involved than the sets my kids had, and the end result lovely. I also decided to get one of the modular buildings, the Parisian Restaurant, and after building it I was hooked. I am also an artist, working in many different painting and drawing mediums. The same winter I was introduced to the fun of building with LEGO, I suffered a freak tobogganing accident. A friend in our area has a “bobsled” run that he built after his niece won Gold in the two-person bobsled in the Olympics. I went down it one day with my kids and nearly tore my ring finger off my dominant hand. It was impossible to paint or draw while my finger was healing. My artistic desire to create meant that I had to find a new medium, and I found that I could still click bricks together.
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I wanted to see what I could create out of the bricks I still had in the house from when my kids were growing up. Since it was mostly tan bricks from the Harry Potter sets, and I had bought some of the new Scooby-Doo sets, I decided to
create a museum, which was my first MOC. It was fun figuring out the structural challenges, but I did not have many bricks so the building was not very coherent. I tried building a couple of other MOCs with my collection of bricks. I also discovered the Eurobricks site and was blown away by some of the creations that others had made from LEGO.
The Hatbox Ghost...
The next year for Christmas my children got me the Tower Bridge set and I discovered Bricklink, which really increased the number of bricks at my disposal. I decided to improve my first MOC and was very happy and honoured when Kristel blogged about it on ModularsbyKristel. I enjoy creating the exterior of the buildings, but love being able to create the interior, which are kind of like hidden gems inside jewelry boxes. My favorite theme is still probably architectural buildings—my second career choice after being a biologist, which is what I did before having children. I am inspired to build things based on upcoming events and interesting buildings where I live. My Disney Haunted Mansion and the fortune tellers came about because and I was visiting Los Angeles last summer with my two daughters and we decided to visit Disneyland for the first time. One of my other MOCs that I created before our trip was based on the Cristal d’Orleans store in Disney’s New Orleans Square. One of my Christmas creations was inspired by the Christmas windows that were displayed for 10 years at Hudson Bay’s flagship store in Toronto. This Christmas I built a typical scene from Christmases past in rural Eastern Ontario and I wanted to try my hand at building my own version of a Christmas train. I found that six-stud wide did not let me build as intricate an interior to the train cars as I wanted, so I tried my hand at an eight-stud wide version. It is fun learning new techniques by trying different types of builds.
...and the swinging wake.
My latest creation, which is still a work in progress, is based on my favorite style of house in Eastern Ontario. Limestone cottages/farmhouses are beautiful, particularly in the spring and summer surrounded by lush gardens, and after a particularly wintery March in this part of the world I wanted to create something to harken summer. ( I just posted a couple of photos on my Flickr page of progress so far). I really wanted to try to Karen’s Haunted Mansion. create different types of vegetation for the garden. I build organically. After I think of an idea, I just start clicking bricks together. Basically it is trial and error. The error part usually involves underestimating the number of bricks it will take to build things. If I am really stuck at trying to achieve the effect I am after, I will research online to see how others have tackled the problem. I have kept a few of my MOCs together but have had to take a few apart so I could build new things. I don’t belong to a LUG nor have I been to a LEGO convention, but hopefully I will be able to attend one this summer to see in person the amazing things that other people have created. You can see more of Karen’s work at her Flickr gallery: https://www. flickr.com/ photos/134354727@ N08/or by scanning this QR code!
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People
On the air!
Berthil van Beek’s
Great Ball Adventure! Article and Photography by Berthil van Beek
I am from the Netherlands, 50 years old, and have two children who are studying at University. I work as a Business Intelligence Manager for the largest synthetic rubber producer in the world called Arlanxeo, a joint venture between Lanxess (formerly Bayer) and Saudi Aramco (the largest oil company in the world). As an 11-year-old boy, I got the first Technic set 853 as a birthday gift. That started my love for LEGO. I built a lot of MOC Technic models from the first Technic sets available. However, my LEGO collection during my childhood was very limited due to the financial situation of the family I grew up in, as my father died very early in my childhood. Like most AFOLs, my interest in LEGO diminished during my teenage years, but it never really left. It was revived by buying many sets as birthday and Christmas gifts for my two children during their childhood. They were not much into Technic, so that part of the collection was still underrepresented. Something kept nagging to overcome my childhood ‘frustration’ of not having enough LEGO to build what I wanted. In the last 3 years I have overcome this frustration by buying a lot of LEGO. After seeing the beautiful historic Formula 1 LEGO models of Luca Rusconi, I came out of my Dark Age and collected all the LEGO from my youth and my children from the attic three years ago. Together with many Bricklinked bricks and my 39-year-old LEGO parts from the 358 set, I have built 11 Formula 1 models designed by Luca. I next discovered the LEGO modular buildings and collected all of them. After that, I thought it was time to design my own modular. For this I combined my favorite sport with the place where I practice the sport twice a week—that being squash and the Squash Centre in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The modular squash court I designed and built was well received by AFOLs and is currently on display at the squash center in Maastricht.
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LEGO World Netherlands
Every year LEGO World Netherlands is organized by LEGO and the Dutch AFOL community. In 2016 it attracted almost 100,000 visitors in one week in Utrecht. It is a great event for children with lots of building corners in all available LEGO themes. Last year in 2016 I showed the eleven F1 models and the squash center there. It was during LEGO World I discovered the LEGO Great Ball Contraptions, also known as GBCs. I was fascinated by the combination of technical and creative skills needed to design and build GBCs. Already during LEGO World I researched GBCs and soon the name Akiyuki surfaced. The creations of this Japanese GBC designer and builder are excellent and a challenge to build and calibrate. I decided to build three of his most complicated GBCs to learn how GBCs work. These were the Ball Factory, Invisible Lift, and Marble Run. The Marble Run does not comply to GBC rules; it does not have a standardized inbox and outbox and also lacks mechanics. To practice building GBCs, I added an inbox and outbox to the Marble Run, as well as two fast rotating wheels to shoot up the LEGO balls in the middle of the Marble Run, making it a standalone GBC to fit end-to-end with other fans’ creations for continual movement of LEGO’s tiny soccer balls and basketballs. As with the modular houses and squash center, it was now time to design and build my own GBC, the Rainbow Wave.
Formula racers on display.
Berthil’s squash center in the middle of a modular building block.
The front of the center.
A bar beside the court.
The court and surrounding floor.
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Building
Article by Joe Meno Photography by Geoff Zhang
Henry Pinto’s Sentinel. Sentinel, X-Men, Hulkbuster TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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Sentinel Approaching!
Henry Pinto is a manager at a property valuation firm. He has been a Property Valuer for 14 years in total. About 4 years ago he began building. Like many, he went through a “Dark Age”, until he was re-acquainted with LEGO when his oldest son turned five. His son began collecting the LEGO Batman sets at first and after a short time, began to notice that they didn’t look like the movies or cartoons that his dad was watching. It was his son’s insistence for “screen accuracy” that challenged Henry to attempt his first real MOC, which was the Batman Begins Tumbler. As Henry notes, “My first attempt was really nothing special, but I can definitely say that a ‘spark’ inside was triggered.” His first attempt was then followed by many re-builds until he was finally happy to call it an official MOC. It was also at this point he displayed for the first time at the Sydney Brickshow and joined SYDLUG, which introduced Henry to some serious LEGO builders and truly amazing people. His favorite theme is definitely LEGO Superheroes. Having grown up with all of the characters as a child it’s something he can share with both his sons, who are now 9 and 6 years old. Henry recently started watching the X-Men animated series (’92 to ’97) with both of them. His sons are also huge fans of Spider-Man and Venom, which makes him a fan by default. His favorite specific Superhero theme is definitely LEGO Batman—he’s a great fan of Batman, including the comics and screen media. Henry has always loved robots and Mecha ever since childhood. He remembers vividly watching Voltron, Astroboy and Technoman in the mornings. This would grow into a
love of Japanese anime when he became a teenager—in particular Neon Genesis Evangelion. Comics followed shortly after and he got hooked on Marvel and DC after that. Henry always remembered creating LEGO robots in his childhood. He remembered wanting to create his own Johhny 5 robot and Terminator, even remembering trying to create a life size T-800 hand out of LEGO Technic and putting a latex glove over it to scare his brother when he was ten. It was only a matter of time before he would attempt a giant LEGO robot. And Henry explains, “All LEGO Mech builders have a little mad scientist in their head telling them to make their mech’s bigger and badder than the one they built before.” His first attempt at a LEGO robot as a serious LEGO builder was a Hulkbuster MOC, which was well received by his friends on Facebook. He also learned a lot of lessons with that build. It gave Henry ideas how to create oversize limbs that would be structurally sound, which is when he thought he could create a robot/mech that would be truly “massive”. Henry wanted the creation to be instantly recognizable and not just something purely from his imagination, as when one creates something from LEGO that exists in reality, people can instantly form a bond with it. Being a fan of Marvel and the X-Men as well as LEGO Superheroes, The Sentinel was the obvious choice; however the head was always the part that needed to be perfect, otherwise Henry wasn’t going to attempt it. The head is so iconic—it basically hasn’t changed since it was first published.
Henry’s first MOC, a Hulkbuster.
He never really used LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) before the Sentinel, but he thought he would use it to see if he could replicate the angles necessary to create the iconic head (Henry also wanted to see how much magenta he would need). After a few attempts, he was happy with the design and showed it to a couple of his friends on The LEGO Marvel and DC Australia Page on Facebook. Their reaction gave him the encouragement to move forward with the build. After the head was complete, Henry really contemplated if he should attempt to build the whole thing (he originally thought of doing just the head), as he knew It would take a huge commitment to see it through, but he also thought if there was ever going to be an opportunity to create an iconic giant LEGO robot, this would be it. The Sentinel and X-Men hold such a special place in our childhood for so many (“If you haven’t tried to make a Sentinel voice when playing with friends, then you haven’t had a childhood,” Henry notes), so for him, doing it right was the most important aspect of the build, and in his opinion, the only way to bring out the details was to go big—really big.
A breakdown of the Sentinel’s hand.
Henry never plans his builds—he always over-orders on Bricklink what parts/color he might need. The model takes shape as he builds. The Sentinel head was the first time he really used LDD. Even its body was free built. What he tries to do is see what pieces of LEGO would best represent the iconic sections of a subject, then try and see how he can attach it. The Sentinel took him three months to build, from the moment Henry started the head to the day he finished. He estimates that it has some 6,000 to 7,000 pieces. The first challenge came with the head. Just getting it to look right from most angles was really hard for Henry. The
A look at the boots and feet.
25
Building
The Norfolk & Western’s Big Steam Freight Haulers: Class A and Y6b Article and Photography by Cale Leiphart These two locomotives, the Norfolk & Western’s Class A and Class Y6b are my latest big articulated locomotives. These two builds have their genesis in my desire to update an older build of the Y6b I had built several years ago, and in a rare opportunity to build LEGO models for a commission.
pretty well, had nice detail, and was even the first ever winner of Best Train at Brickworld in 2009. It proved that Power Functions could not only work in trains, but could do things 9v couldn’t do when it smashed the competition at the train pull completion at Brickworld ’08. I felt I had done what I set out to do.
My original model of the Y6b was my first attempt at an articulated locomotive, a locomotive type with two sets of driving wheels, pistons and running gear that articulate in the center to help the long locomotive cope with tighter curves. The Union Pacific “Big Boy” is probably the most famous of this type. At the time I built my original Y6b in 2008, I was dissatisfied with the articulated style engines from other builders. The majority of them seemed too compromised, too out of scale in relation to the real prototypes they were based on, and too lacking in detail. I felt I could build a better example, and for the most part I did. It was one of the first LEGO locomotive models to successfully use Power Functions for power instead of the traditional 9v, before even LEGO’s own 46 Emerald Night set came out. It stuck to scale
Fast forward to 2016, eight years later, and the LEGO train hobby has advanced in skill and quality immensely. I had since built two more articulated type locomotives, a Baltimore & Ohio EM-1 2-8-8-4, which was an advancement of my ideas employed in the Y6b, and a Western Maryland Challenger 4-6-6-4 which I built for a competition between myself and my good friend Nate Brill. Each one of these was a progressively better model than the last. But my old Y6b was starting to show its age; it ran well, but the quality and detail of the models being built by LEGO train fans today was so much more advanced. Better parts, and better techniques have come out since the old Y was built. It was time to build a new Y6b locomotive—a build with all the best parts available and all the accumulated knowledge of building trains that I could throw at it.
The rebuild had been on my mind for some time, but other projects always seemed to take priority, so the old Y6 just sat boxed up, waiting its turn at the build table—that is, until a unique opportunity was presented to me. A gentleman I had met a few years ago at a LEGO convention contacted me. He had seen the old Y6 model at that event. He was a big Norfolk & Western Railway fan and was impressed with my model—so much so that he want to purchase a copy of it from me as well as commission me to build a model of the N&W class A locomotive. This was not the first time I had been asked by someone about buying one of my models. And I’ve always tried to give a fair price, keeping in mind that my train models often contain well over a thousand parts, and often over a hundred hours in researching, planning, acquiring parts, designing, building, and applying decals. I can’t build models for others for free and so far, no one yet had felt they were worth the asking price. This time was different though. I came up with an estimate of what I would be willing to build the two models for, and emphasized that the Y6b model wouldn’t be a version of the old model I had built, but a brand new version with better
Y6b Locomotive
The Y6b was known as the “workhorse” of the Norfolk & Western Railway and probably the ultimate evolution of the Mallet (Malley) type. The Mallet style of articulated locomotive reused the exhaust steam from the rear cylinders to power the front cylinders. This gave the Mallet type great power while also being very economical to run. Starting with locomotive no. 2120 in 1936, the Y6 class would become the final refinement of the N&W’s 2-8-8-2 design. With the completion of locomotive no. 2200 in 1952, this Y6b would become the last mainline US manufactured steam locomotive produced.
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Community
Building a New LEGO® Train Publication
Brick Model Railroader’s home page.
Brick Model Railroader Article, Photography and art by Cale Leiphart
Have you ever looked at the LEGO® community and seen a hole that you thought you could fill? Well, Brick Model Railroader is my attempt at filling this hole. If you’re a LEGO train fan, you may have heard about it. To put it simply, Brick Model Railroader, or BMR (as we sometimes refer to it) is a LEGO train news and information resource. But to understand what BMR is and why I thought it was needed, we must follow the story back to its beginning. Brick Model Railroader launched on December 30, 2016, but its story really starts years earlier. The seed for Brick Model Railroader was planted with the end of another LEGO train publication, RAILBRICKS. Created by Jeramy Spurgeon and friend Mark Peterson, RAILBRICKS was a LEGO train fan magazine produced from late 2007 to 2014 with 15 issues released in total. As a magazine devoted to the LEGO train hobby, RAILBRICKS’ mission was to bring new builders to the LEGO train hobby as well as inspire the current LEGO train fan with articles on a broad range of subjects from builders to clubs, and reviews to in-depth articles on building techniques. My first encounter with RAILBRICKS was at Brickworld 2007 when I was asked to write an article for the first issue of the magazine. It was the first time I had been asked to write an article for any publication. I was both excited and honored, as my train building had progressed to the level that I was now able to share my knowledge with others in the hobby and help make them better builders. I would go on to become a regular contributor to the magazine throughout its run. I really enjoyed both reading and contributing to RAILBRICKS. It was a go-to source for the best the LEGO train community had to offer and an inspiration for us hobbyists to push the LEGO train hobby to new levels of awesome. But RAILBRICKS would eventually come to an end. Its creator and editor Jeramy Spurgeon left the LEGO hobby after a few years to concentrate more on family and career. Elroy Davis stepped in to take over editing the magazine, and we contributors tried to do what we could to help, but without Jeramy, the magazine lost momentum. Losing momentum soon brought the magazine to a halt. The last issue came in the summer of 2014.
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RAILBRICKS was always a volunteer effort for everyone involved. It was a labor of love, but not a job. It was something that we devoted free time to when we could. Producing a magazine of the quality level we wanted was a huge effort, and as contributors moved on, it became harder to gain new blood due to inactivity; the magazine soon became more than those left could maintain. Seeing RAILBRICKS end was hard for all us involved. We took pride in knowing that RAILBRICKS was a focal point for the LEGO train community. It was a repository for all the great knowledge of train building. Not having
RAILBRICKS left a hole and the LEGO train community lost a great resource. Sure the previously released issues were still available to download for free, but we had no central outlet for new ideas and no one source to turn to when we wanted to know what others were building and how they built their models. This is where Brick Model Railroader began, in the hole that RAILBRICKS left behind. It didn’t have a name yet, or even a plan for what it was going to be. But there was an idea there to create a new place for train builders to gather and share ideas. Like many ideas, this one changed shape as time went on and became something very different than what it started life as. The genesis of Brick Model Railroader started with a post by Elroy Davis to the Eurobricks train forum in March of 2016. Elroy wanted to start a new LEGO train magazine. His idea was to create a new magazine with paid subscriptions unlike RAILBRICK’s free online distribution. The money from subscriptions would be partly used to pay those who contributed to the magazine. Of course this would probably never be much, but Elroy felt that having some kind of reimbursement for contributors would help generate more content. Getting people to write articles for RAILBRICKS was always a struggle. As soon as I read Elroy’s post I contacted him. I too wanted to do something to fill the hole left behind by RAILBRICKS. We discussed many ideas and looked at options. We also examined the potential customer base for this new magazine. And here lay the problem with the for-profit LEGO train magazine idea: The LEGO train community, despite the attention we may get with our large train layouts at events, is a small community. We are a niche within the larger LEGO hobby niche. We are not large enough to support a subscription magazine as Elroy had proposed, at least not yet. Elroy eventually came to this conclusion, and the question then became, what can we do instead? This is when the idea came to home to roost. We needed a place to turn to as a hub for LEGO train enthusiasts. But what should that place be? I soon found myself turning to a sometimes overlooked branch of RAILBRICKS, the blog. Yes, RAILBRICKS had a blog, it was an outlet for current news, and news about upcoming magazine issues, but mostly it functioned the same as most LEGO blogs. It was a place to cover cool models that we had seen from other train builders. The blog was a nice way to get content out there without having to wait three months for the next magazine issue. But the blog interface on the RB site was a bit clunky and so it wasn’t updated with new articles as often as it should have been. I felt there was potential in the blog though. It just needed some new ideas and a fresh start. I knew the strong point of the blog was that it was very easy to upload new content to. Unlike the magazine format which took weeks to edit and put together, assuming you had enough articles to fill the pages, the blog format could be updated with new articles as soon as contributors could write them. No waiting three months for the next issue, you could be reading a new article several times a week. And with this frequent updating of new content, the media becomes more of a fixture in the everyday hobby. It has more visible life to it, and when fans see a lively publication, they are more willing to contribute their own content. The other big advantage to the blog format is that writers often seem to feel more at ease writing for it. Many feel that they may not be good enough writers to write for a magazine. This usually isn’t the case if the writer is passionate for what they’re writing about, but the stigma is there. A blog, though, feels like a more attainable entry point for writing, and so it becomes easier to get people to write for you. I did not want to follow the standard LEGO blog format, however. I love seeing the great models featured on most blogs, but I want this new LEGO train publication to be so much more. One of the great things about RAILBRICKS was the many in-depth articles on aspects of the train hobby. Building techniques, model design, layout construction, all were great resources to builders in sharing knowledge. I wanted those type of articles to find a home
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A selection of RAILBRICKS magazines.
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