Tolga's Railroad Repository

Christmas is over, so it's time to watch stores for After-Christmas clearances. Historically, I scored the Sphinx set, which is a great parts pack, for half off at Walmart. This year, I hope to miraculously score Laval's Royal Fighter from Chima. Wait, why am I mentioning clearances? Because of what they can do to what I am really going to talk about... my 2014 LEGO plans. 2012 and 2013 have been marked by a boom in LEGO's color palette... not so much for earth tones, even though, yes, Olive Green sprouted and more Dark Tan than ever was being put out in sets. Dark orange made a 8 year comeback as well. But case in point, the big growth has been within the Friends and Chima lines. And it only took me until this summer to capitalize on it. Laval's Royal Fighter has a healthy chunk of Flame Yellowish parts that will help greatly when building FEC or CSX locomotives. This tone of yellow will look better than standard Bright Yellow on locomotives and even TTX boxcars....

Sifting through some inventories on Bricklink, I found the parts list for the less than desirable Sunshine Ranch Friends Set and found two oddballs: 14719 Tile 2x2 Corner - A fairly essential piece, it resolves the need for improvising this configuration with a 1x2 and 1x1. Personally, I find this as juniorization for this configuration but it can certainly come in handy. This set has four in white. 15397 Plate 3x3 Cross - AKA "Railroad Crossing" piece, this part is the combination of a 1x3 with 1x1s off the center, making a perfect X. Robin and I used a similar but thicker configuration to rig crossbucks as I remember it, but this piece will, when released in white, eliminate the need for it. 1 of this is in Dark Orange in the ranch, presumably for the tree. Trees and certain connections will render this part quite useful.

One of the reasons I chose to reshape this blog is because of the dynamically changing transportation scene, which is indeed my cup of tea. Florida East Coast Railway is building a container transfer yard at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. It's old news and I saw the site myself when my mom and I were there on business. However, Local 10 has just had a story on it . video platform video management video solutions video player To hear that this project is finally inching towards completion is great news. It is a big economic plus for FEC as well as Port Everglades and South Florida. It will probably lead to the reinstatement of trains 117-218 as more capacity means more trains. Already, it will mean fewer trucks and less congested roadways. This project was something that should have been done years ago but the port lead in Everglades has been deteriorating. Now, it's being rebuilt and reshaped. Just earlier this year, ethanol made its debut at Motiva Enterprises ...