Mk. IV 2-Bay 45-Foot Hopper Car
A design for a prototype coal hopper car done in Lego Digital Designer.
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About this creation
Mk. IV 2-Bay 45-Foot Hopper Car
This is a scale model of a coal hopper railroad car, where 1.875mm on the model is equal to 1 scale inch. Using this scale, the car is 45 feet long, approximately 10 feet wide, and 13 feet high (from the bottom of the bays to the rim of the car.) At this scale, a minifig is almost exactly 6 feet tall, so I feel that I've managed to make a car I can confidently call "minifig scale." I call it the Mk. IV because, as may be expected, it is my fourth attempt at a hopper car in LDD so far, and it is by far the one I am most pleased with in terms of aesthetics, adherence to scale proportions, and functionality of the bay doors. The bay doors, since it's not obvious from the full-car shot, are all independently hinged and latched so that moving the levers on the sides of the cars up will release the bay doors so that they can swing freely and the car can dump its load of "coal," which will be 1x1 round and square plates.
There are obviously some placeholder parts and omissions left out of this digital mock-up. Obviously, all red parts would be replaced with light grey and the blue technic pins used on the latches would be replaced with some shade of grey as well. The ladder will doubtfully remain mismatched as they appear here. The discs used as wheels are simply there to take the place of the actual train wheels, which I will modify into this American-looking truck style as per instructions in a back issue of Brick Journal. A chain running from beside the brakeman's wheel to the car's base is missing, as is a larger airbrake cylinder using SNOT construction which I am unable to model in LDD. Other than that, the model will stand more or less as-is, with the exception of a paint scheme and further detailing.
One particular detail of some note would be a mock up of the bar codes experimented-with some decades ago in order to electronically monitor the position of my rolling stock on the layout, just as the real railroads attempted to use the system. However, while their system failed to the bar codes becoming smudged and unreadable in the industrial environments railroads tend to service, I forsee my main obstacle being Mindstorms optical sensors' ability to quickly identify the bar codes' colors as they whiz by.
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