Lego Trains
Quite possibly the best two words you can put together.
We went on a family holiday to LegoLand Denmark for the boys birthday in 2024. Such a great place and needless to say everyone got the Lego bug when we got home, but it was me who really wanted the lego trains.
Unsurprisingly, there are whole communities dedicated to it, and I was soon learning about the various vintages and designs of lego trains over the years. It’s easy to get sucked in and start wanting the older sets (or the monorail!) but I wanted to actually build something and not spend a fortune. 1 The simplest way was to just buy a set that is available.
The passenger train one was on sale at Smyths and so (the weekend my wife was away!) we drove there and picked it up. I also bought a couple of track extension packs, but they’re quite pricy.
Like most track based toys, you always want more track. I started buying up used track on bricklink, but soon I’d picked up all the cheap stuff and the rest was too much per unit from local sellers, or the postage would kill anything from overseas. I then moved onto 3rd party track from Aliexpress, and got a good deal on a lot of track. You can tell it’s not authenic lego track but it still works and when you need 3m of straight for each side of the loop, you take anything you can find.
Next was more trains! I decided to follow a guide for taking a previous monorail train, and motorising it, but then changing it to a unikitty style for our youngest. This was built in Stud.io and then I ordered the parts from Bricklink. I forget how much I spent but it’s always more than you think!
Still not satisfied, I looked for another train but this time trying to be more cost conscious. I saw used sets or parts of sets going for reasonable prices on eBay and so tried to pickup the freight train. I bought some parts on ebay and then the rest from bricklink. In the end, I think it might’ve been better just to buy the set, but buying it in small batches made it feel cheaper!
I spent too long on YouTube on channels like, Battery Powered Bricks and wanted to get all the trains. I managed to resist and instead spent my time trying to design train tracks that would fit. He did show some nice wagons for logs and trees, which were very reasonable, and so I bought the parts for those.
We don’t have a permanent place to setup the lego train, I wish we did, and could build a city around it, so for now it lives in boxes and then comes out every so often for us to make a new track and play with them.
The biggest downside to them is the batteries. The train motors need a bunch of AAA (six I think) and the controller needs another four. Mine are all rechargable but it’s just a pain. There are third party rechargable battery packs but they’re quite expensive. I’ve seen rumours that Lego are going to introduce a rechargable pack themselves, and so hopefully that’ll make the situation a little better.
I really want to make the Maersk trains but using slightly different colours (so as to not have to buy the expensive Maersk blue) but it seems a little excessive! I did buy the custom stickers for it though 🙈
End Game
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I still spent a fortune. ↩︎