I thought about it a bit and decided trying to stuff a 9v motor in the locomotive was a fools errand.  However, adding one to the tender looked pretty straight forward.  I decided to poke around a bit and there is thread on LUGNET and a number of blog posts that describe various solutions to the problem.  The LUGNET thread in particular is pretty involved and uses a gutted 9v motor along with Power Functions.  A bit more than I am willing to take on right now although I do have several dead 9v motors.  From further searching it appears there are a number of solutions depending on how close you want it the train to look compared to standard instrcutions.  I am not too picky, I just want it work and not look awkward.

There was an NCLUG meeting this past Sunday afternoon and I decided to take a loop of 9v track and the Emerald Night along with some parts with me to see if I could make it run.  The key to my idea was to add a single wheel set and a 9v motor to the tender.  Doing this meant tweaking the chassis design of the tender a bit to account for the pin on the 9v motor.  The modification is pretty simple and makes use of some standard size black plates.   I have documented the changes to the tender chassis and produced instructions using Lpub.  The instructions for the tender are not complete – they just replace steps 1-5 and eliminate steps 16-18 in the official instructions.

So does it work?  Sort of.  I say sort of because the modifications to the tender work fine however the tender struggles to push the locomotive through the curves on the small loop.  I think this is due to the large train wheels on the locomotive which are linked together via Technic axels to bind up.

Unfortunately I didn’t have any parts with me that I could use to swap out the axels for simple pins which I hope will solve the problem.  I hope to try this in the next day or two as I want to run the Emerald Night at LEGOPalooza.

Instructions

9v 10194 Tender 2010-01-25 - downloaded 357 times My take on converting the 10194 to 9v by motorizing the tender.

So I thought about it and decided I could do a small Pirate display on short notice and it would be fun.  I have a small island I had a built a while back which is an adaptation of the Blacksmith’s Shop which I turned into an island tavern with a dock and lots of pirates having a good time.

I reused the elevated platform I had under last months display to clear the cardboard frame that goes on the outside of the window.  Having trains under a Pirate water scene doesn’t make any sense so instead of trains, I put the NCLUG sign I built years ago to match the NCLUG logo.  It is set back so that it is completely visible.  I had planned to put it right up front against the window but when I did, the “G” was covered.  Setting it back into the display actually looks pretty cool, gives people a reason to peek under the sea!  If I was really clever I’d have a ship wreck down there.  Maybe next time!

View Slide Show.

So I went a different route.  I will have a Christmas themed town display featuring a Christmas parade on display.  I added some height to the display by building three train lines underneath the city – it is sort of a subway feel to it but there isn’t any access between to the two levels.  It should look pretty good though.  It will be interesting to see how dark the lower section is – if it is too dark I may have to dig out some of the LEGO Train LED headlights I got on clearance a few years ago.  I think I paid $1 each for them or some silly amount so I have about 50 of them.

I’ll post some pictures once the display is up.  My two youngest daughters helped me with the parade, each of them built a float and some other parade stuff.  They’re very excited about going with me to set it up this afternoon.