I came home this afternoon (Wednesday April 22) to find a nice box on my back porch… just finished building it at about 2:30 AM and here it is!
I ordered K10194: Emerald Night Collection consisting of the engine, (10194, Emerald Night), power functions parts, and the new flex track. It works quite well with the IR remote control and the track is indeed flexible. But now, bedtime.
Thanks for the quick update — it looks like the loss of sleep was well worth it!
So how hard would it be to work the power functions into our existing custom trains?
The big issue would be delivering power to the wheels. The Emerald Night uses a Technic drivetrain to power the wheels: the rearmost main driver wheel is powered, via gears, by a PF XL motor. The other four driver wheels (unflanged middle and flanged front wheels) are driven by the connecting rods from that axle. So your steam custom MOCs could do the same thing. For diesel MOCs the easiest solution would be to get a PF to 9V adapter and power the train motor (either 9V or IR motors should work).
One more question if you don’t mind. How big is the IR Receiver, and where is it built into the Emerald Night?
Thanks
It’s the same IR receiver as in other Power Functions products, like the dinosaur. it’s embedded into the boiler – if you look at the pictures, there’s a black 2×4 bit in the middle. The instructions have you build it unpowered, and then there are supplemental directions that have you remove a few details, and replace them with the PF parts.
can not find this set anywhere??? any suggestions?? lego site said that it is discontinued…
No, it’s available.
http://shop.lego.com/ByTheme/Product.aspx?p=10194&cn=419&d=328
The Emerald Night with power functions doesn’t appear to be available. You have to buy the power functions separately. I wonder if it’s related to the recall of the power functions recall.
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml09/09753.html
Thanks for the update Greg – that sounds likely. Hopefully they’ll get it back online soon.
Do you know if anyone has converted The Emerald Night to the old 12v system. The train is wonderful, but I have a vast amount of the 12v system, all in good working order, the gauge is the same, so it would be a shame if I couldn’t get it run with all the other loco’s. I had one brief go at it, but it was not successful.
I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Here in the US the old 12v system is pretty rare, since it was never sold here. But someone in my club has made a version that runs on 9v tracks. The easiest way would be to put the motor in the tender and have the locomotive just be unpowered.
Thanks Bill. I previously tried substituting the rear bogey section on the locomotive with 12v motor; involved drilling a hole in the baseplate. Although the train would move along a straight, it came to grief on bends, as the “replacement” powered bogey had a fixed rather than a floating point as in the original.
I’ll try the tender, although I am attempting to retain as much of the original look as possible; I would hate to lose the suspension mouldings as a for instance.
Thanks again.