December 19, 2008 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Advent Calendars, Day 19

Today we get a bearded railway maintenance worker for the City calendar, and a bowl of produce for Castle.

Neither is particularly remarkable, though the scale on the fruit & veggies is a bit out of whack with minifigs. No surprise, as they were originally made for Belville. But on the City side we get new minifigures two days in a row! That’s unusual for an advent calendar; usually they’re about every third day.

As for fitting these into any kind of coherent story, I could say that the produce is for sale by a food vendor, so clearly yesterday’s minifig was selling food in Stormwind, but the only kind of apples I’ve ever seen in WoW are red and I’ve never seen a carrot there, so that is tenuous at best.

LEGO Cruise Ship Contest

There are LEGO building contests organized by LEGO hobbyists all the time, but this may be the first time a company (other than LEGO itself) is soliciting entries in a contest. STX Europe, a shipyard that builds some of the world’s largest cruise ships, is sponsoring a building contest using LEGO Digital Designer.

Oasis

The winner of the highly challenging Innovative series will fly to Miami, and supervise his/her model being constructed in the Miami Seatrade Cruise Shipping event March 16-19, 2009. The winner of the Oasis series will be rewarded with an Oasis of the Seas engraved Apple iPod music player, as well as three models of his/her own Oasis LEGO design in a gift pack. The winner model of the Oasis series will be used as a corporate gift by STX Europe.

I am sure there will be some very impressive entries, even though personally I’m not a fan of the LDD software.

Via BrickJournal blog.

RoadRailer Trailer

This cargo trailer is both a railcar and a trailer for a truck. The rail wheelsets are removable, and the road wheels are then available to be towed down the road. I built this many years ago and it’s been on numerous BayLTC train layouts, but I never put pictures online until now.

I first learned about these interesting hybrid vehicles on the PBS television show Tracks Ahead. They are a real thing made by Wabash National. Each trailer has permanently-attached road wheels, and can have railroad wheelsets attached for use in a train. The trailers are hitched to each other, with the wheelset mounted on the rear of the trailer, and a special wheelset is attached to the front one.

See the Flickr photoset for detailed pictures from various angles, or click for a slideshow.

By the way, when I posted my Gondola car, I said that was my first train car MOC. Technically I guess the RoadRailers are, but the Gondola is more of a “train car” in the traditional sense, whereas the RoadRailers are more road trailers that can be carried as a part of a train in my mind.