LEGO said that the Orient Express cannot be motorized. They were wrong.

I think it's honestly just another scummy Lego practice of cheaping out on a model so we have to end up paying them more for things that should've been included but weren't. amen

For me, its the price holding me back on adding it to my wish list of lego sets.

I just have a question, can someone pls give a manual for attaching the magnetic couplers pls? (thanks whoever answers this)

Not sure why LEGO said it it's too heavy. Maybe after some months, the motor and mechanical parts start to wear?

I would assume, that the biggest test requirement is the duration of running on 1 battery charge.

I love this thumbnail

My entire body SCREAMS with incredulation that Lego continue to push out trains that don't have a power option. OK I appreciate they are doing them as fancy ornaments but why not make the power an add-on to keep the price down, whilst at least giving us the option without all this fiddling about. This sort of issue defines my frustration with life in general. Its an epic failure of reasoning because we all want to power these and add to our train collection. Poor show Lego.

Just imagine what would be possible if we had powered rails...
one could just put a motorised bogey under every carrige without modifying it and trains could have any desired lenght and weight....

Translation: we didn't try vary hard because "orient" is a no no word.

lol you literally put on rubber bands to make it move and you dont even thought about it in your speculation section, srsly

Hey,im have idea,why will not done Lego train or car work model Engine Stirling?

they didn't actually say that clickbaiter earn ur dislike

The lack of being able to motorized was what was stopping me I have wanted a lego train for years

for $300 I would think it would be motorized. this Lego set should be $200-$250 at most. I think Lego like to rip off people for some reason.

Neat and informative thank you!

I think a dual motor set up would work very well.

(Uses the coaches for snowpiercer)

this set is complete trash. a duplo engine without motor... wouldn't even pay 99€ for it

It's weird seeing modern LEGO train tracks don't have metal on them. Trains used to always be powered through the rails so they wouldn't need any batteries.

i used to put penny's in my old first gen lego trains.

they ran better. so im not convinced weight is the issue!

LEGO sucks

Maybe it couldn't pass incline tests.

this video got recommended to me. I just wanted to say the lego city freight train (im from th euk) is £159.99 and the UNMOTORISED orient express is £300 thank you for this video idk how many other people you may have stopped from being scammed and very informative. i susbcribed

LEGO is always wrong

Just spent some time looking for motorisation of the train and found some fantastic options over at ReBrickable. There are locomotives and tenders and 5 new carriage options! Worth a look!

My tinfoil hat theory would be that the train cars are too long for turns and causes too much stress on the individual parts (I don't own any LEGO trains so I can't compare past car lengths). LEGO would then have to shorten the car lengths to meet the playability criteria, which would make the display aspects of the model much poorer. Considering the origional intent was a display model, they opted not to provide motorization instructions and have a static display model instead.

Coming from HO I learned that plastic on plastic friction is greater than metal on metal, even if the contact geometries are very similar. One thing most HO modelers do is to replace plastic wheels with metal wheels, even if the bogies were plastic, changing to a metal wheel set (both axle and wheel made out of metal) improved rolling performance significantly.

So I just powered the Orient Express tender, which is way easier I think, with the hub 88009 and train motor 88011 then swapped out the front wheels on the locomotive with the ones from the older Harry Potter train 75955 (cuz there much smoother) and it seems to run fine with that setup so far

Fun thing with the trains... it's not really about power, but getting that power to work. Depending on how many drive wheels contact the rails and how much weight is pressing down on them, compared to the force reuired to pull the train, the wheels will slip and turn freely.
Since the drive wheel size was directly connected to top speeds with steam locomotives, the cylinders created slightly uneven torque depending on where in the stroke they were, a noticable lag in reaction of the engine to throttle commands AND a purely mechanical throttle had limited fine adjustment capabilities, it was pretty difficult to ride the razor edge of enough torque to pull the train and too much torque to not slip.

Add rigid axles and lack of individual electronic monitoring of each wheel, and the steamers had their work cut out for them.

Old 12V Lego trains often included large, 3tall 2x6 or 2x8 bricks with heavy metal weights inside, to include in the engines. It increased the train weight, but in the good way: more pressing down on the drive wheels.

So maybe just try and increase the weight of the engine, by stuffing some fishing weights or so over the wheels?

I'd assume LEGO would hook some meters up to the motors and analyze the power consumption and strain. they likely have limits they don't want to exceed, so as not to wear out the motor too quickly.

I kinda feel like having a proportionally increased 8W emerald knight as engine would have done wonders for this train set. But there is always the issue of LEGO curves just being too darn narrow for any sanely proportioned train :/

Sounds like the lego ideas team needs a reshuffling. Especially if a simple solution they used before escaped them so quickly.

Why not the motor in the tender?

If you use black rubberbands of the same length it would be almost unnoticeable

Idk why but the first thing I thought was “dang that’s pretty detailed, how is it not lagging”

Lego is gettin real lazy for how much they cost

The original submission could theoretically have way more power. It could technically be possible to fit two medium motors in it, with two battery boxes in the tender. Nice thing about lego is you can build anything you can imagine...

Now I want to try building a motorized big boy 4-8-8-4

WoW, how lazy and greedy could LEGO engineers be? Shame

overpriced plastic

I like your blue train😊

Shrinkflation is the correct answer.

I'm planning to power it up with a vintage 9V rail system.

Better buy the Orient Express fom Mould King...

Lego trains... crunchy... 🤤... yummy!!!

that is pretty cool

What if you were to build/combine two orient express train engine's, tender's, and cars into one big train, and power them, would it work?

They just say they can't because it's supposed to be a collector's item. Simple marketing. No magic or incompetence, just capitalism.

Why would you want to give the customers what they want? I will buy a Lego train set that is motorized. I don’t want a static display. What does my boss say to me, “Don’t come with problems but solutions.” If Lego wanted to do this they would have.