Wednesday, 8th May, 2024
After spending what feels like weeks designing and redesigning Lego trains on Studio, I finally settled on one I liked and ordered it. Even the ordering process took me all evening yesterday as I was looking at the combinations of lego.com pick a brick, the various Bricnklink stores around the world, Europe and in the UK. As one store doesn’t sell everything I wanted, it was trying to find the combination of everything that was the most cost effective. After lots of trial and error and a spreadsheet, ordering from all UK stores on bricklink worked out to be the cheapest. I did have some tiles which were only available from a couple of stores but they had hardly anything else I wanted. It meant that one seller was just sending me 8 bricks…plus £3 in postage…so after trying to find somewhere else, I ended up just ordering some fun minifigures from them as well, which meant I spent more than I needed to, but oh well.
There was a Thai store that had loads of bricks, almost everything I needed, and was very good value - but when I added in taxes and shipping it wasn’t much better. Likewise with a Serbian store. Lego.com pick a brick did have free shipping and had a lot of items but it was still more expensive, and the remaining items still had to come from bricklink.
Now I wait for all the packages to arrive, no doubt with some comment from my wife on the number of packages! to then build it. I can see why people just buy two sets from lego and join them together! I just don’t know what to do now…
I spent this evening reading a new Lego Trains book and listening to Dire Straits live.
The Lego train I’m making is small and realtively simple but it still ended up being about £50…watching YouTube videos of people’s setups make me realise just how much they’ve spent on stuff. Especailly the low subscriber count channels, a favourite, whereby they’re not making much/any money from videos to help fund it. I suppose they’ve been doing it for years and years and not being me wanting to go from zero to mega train city setup in one month. I also want Lego Monorail, but they only made about 3 sets in the 90s and used prices are astronomical. I also have to remember that my kids want to play with the Lego, so I shouldn’t get too precious with designs, parts, layouts, etc. and I’m better off buying real lego sets with instructions that they can follow along with.
I was going to make the Maersk train set but now I’m not sure about this, the raw parts are about £170 (with 3 wagons and 6 containers) plus postage from about 5-6 stores, so probably getting towards £200. I have bought several motors and battery boxes, for two new trains, either ones I make, or motorising the Harry Potter train…which given the price of stuff this is probably the best deal, plus everyone would enjoy it. Except my wife will disapporve of just buying it, as it’s like a big present for the kids for no reason whatsoever (welcome to being an adult with disposal income I guess 😅).
Sometimes I wonder what I’d be doing if I wasn’t married with kids. Not in a “I regret my life” way but just out of curiosity. Would I have done ham radio? Lego trains? Where would I be working? So many questions which would all be different. I do think things ended up well for me in general because of life. I do think I’d spend way more money on my own! Housing and food etc. would be less but hobbies would be out of control.
