3' Gauge Heisler-style locomotive & Ore Hopper car owned and operated by the Balin & Sons Mining Co, Central PA, Federal Republic of America. This train brings Coal, Gems and Mithril ore from the mountains of Central PA down to the standard-gauge track at Harrisburg (why haven't we found any gems or Mithril in PA? Well, dwarfs dig deeper than people do...)

Side view, where you can see a Dwarf engineer manning the controls:



Front view, showing details of the Boiler and the coupling gear + the fact that this really IS narrow-gauge (4-studs wide instead of 6):



Top view:



I'm using the special Narrow Gauge track from the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom set.... Fortunately, I just found out that I can get MORE of the same type of track (again, all curves) by buying the Alien Mothership from the Alein Conquest line (I was planning on getting some AC sets anyways just to mess around with the Alien Clinger and stuff).

So, tell me what you think... I kind of have a soft spot for Narrow-gauge trains because the last operating Narrow-Gauge railroad (well that has all its original equipment and is running on the original track) is not too far from my house, namely the East Broad Top Railroad, which is located in Orbisonia.... Back when I was a kid and got the 4.5v train set (the one that came out in 1985), I tried to make a narrow-gauge train, but due to lack of parts or anything like Pick A Brick, or the online resources available now, it was doomed to failure.... Needless to say I was quite delighted when I came back after my second dark age and found the ToD set with pre-fab narrow gauge track... Now if only us LEGO train enthusiasts could convince LEGO to make some non-ramp straight sections, switches and other narrow-gauge track available....

Pretty cool! I like how you did the smoke stack, I woulda never thought of that. My only real qualm is that it feels a bit too colorful for post apoc, but that's just me.

Heh, Hobbit reference. Does he get his coal from Dori and Nori? Rations from Bawlin?

Well, to be honest, my LEGO setting would be more POST-Post-apocalyptic, and the agent of the apocalypse was a massive Anti-matter war that wiped out close to half the earth's population, but left no radiation behind, although it did cause some rifts in the space-time continuum to open up, which is one of the reasons why you have characters from all different settings... of course, such portals happened from time to time BEFORE the Final War, so it's basically a massive-multiplayer crossover setting. It helps if you realize that this setting is based on the LEGO wars my brother and I fought (we were on the same side against common enemies), and thus is a parallel universe that split off our own sometime around 1989 when George Bush (Sr.) usurped power, declared himself king and teamed up with the Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy of Gisborne so he could tax all the poor people to death, but Pennsylvania, under the leadership of Yours Truly, my brother and Robin Hood and his Merry Men successfully revolted.

What followed was wars against Sauron, who had somehow reawakened from his ancient defeat, The Galactic Empire (initially I was using a modified USS Enterprise from Star Trek against them, but later started adding X-wings and such to the fleet), and Pirates (although that one ended when said pirates, including Capt Hook, Capt Long John Silver and Capt One-eyed Willy, decided to accept an offer to form a navy for the recently liberated US in exchange for pardons), and finally the mad scientist, Dr. Regis Blackguard sometime in the mid 2000's.... When he realized he was going to lose, he had his best hackers hack into the controls for everyone's long-range antimatter missiles and launch them all, which was known as the Final War. (a.k.a. my first LEGO dark age), and everyone has been rebuilding since then....

Balin isn't the only LoTR refrenece: Gandalf is the FRA Army Joint Chief of Staff, and Gimli Gloinson is a sergeant in the Army Rangers, along with Cpl. Ugluk Uruk-hai (he found religion)... Not to mention that Galadriel is a Federal Senator, and Legolas is leader of the Elven Ranger Corps (basically a militia unit). Other crossover characters are: Admiral James Hook, Chief of Naval Operations, General Clare, Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Gordon Freeman, Air Force Chief of Staff, Lt. Felix Jaeger & Sgt. Gotreck Gurnisson of the SOCOM "Men at Arms" division, PFC Snorri Nosebiter of the Army Rangers, Col. Henry "Indiana" Jones of the Army Rangers, etc.

Granted, some of the shout-outs are rather obscure, but that's half the fun.

Very cool!!
I've wanted to build some sweet 'old school' trains for years, just haven't gotten there yet.
Nice work and Great pics!!

Wow!
Cute little train. How expensive are those 4-wide train tracks?
EDIT: Scratch that, they're not that expensive. Woo, I'm gonna have my first Lego train!

Glad you guys like it!

Al Pachinko: I seem to remember reading in Wikipedia's article on Narrow Gauge railroads that Poland had a lot of them at one time.... BTW, you are correct: The tracks are fairly inexpensive from Brick Link.... I'm still going to be getting the ones from the Alien Mothership because I was planning on buying it anyways.... You can download the instructions for the Locomotive from my Lego Design by Me gallery page (my LEGO id is Hikaro_Takayama)....

Well, I never understood that world until now, I guess it fits.

I didn't think Bush was that bad. Besides, when you're a bush, you have 2 career choices, politics, or being set on fire for a Biblical epic....

Actually the inital incident happened when I was 10 and got into LEGOs for the first time: My first sets were the Blacktron Alienator and the Forestman's Hideout (both bought on the same day)... Soon after my brother and I go the 1988 Castle Minifigs and some other space stuff (classic space and Futuron), and the big news back then was Bush Sr's tax hikes. Since my brother and I just happened to get into Robin Hood at that time, we decided to take that premise run with it... Similarly, LEGO Pirates debuted at a time when we got interested in Pirates (we both had recently read Treasure Island, seen The Goonies on TV and saw Walt Disney's Peter Pan in a theater re-release that very year), so they got added in. Needless to say, what with always coming up short on LEGO guns and stuff, we'd have both given our left arms for some kind of custom, mail-order LEGO weapons & accessories companies like BrickArms and Brickforge.

To put it mildly, our world may have been as full of strife and warfare as Warhammer 40K, but it wasn't grim and dark: We went about things with tongue firmly in cheek, and I decided to continue the basic setting as a monument to the good times we spent together.

Anyways, interesting facts about the train:

First of all, the boiler assembly is mostly one piece, namely one of those jet-engine pieces that first appeared in the Star Wars line: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=30360 Since I have an original Royal Naboo Starfighter from 1999, I could easily make a yellow version of this engine.

The coupling scheme I worked out involves those 2x2 socket plates you can get on Pick a Brick, combined with two Ball-Hitch axle pieces combined with an axle extender... I tried using the ball hitch plate available on PaB, but it didn't offer enough flexibility going around the curves, so I decided to try using some of my extra technic pieces and they worked quite well... Now I just need to find a good source for those ball-hitch technic pieces since they don't offer them on PaB....

Everything else is fairly straight-forward. My next Narrow gauge project involves trying to make a NG passenger car to hitch behind the engine for hauling the workers to and from the mine, along with the ore cars...