Lego-compatible railway truck, Bausteinwagen (Marklin 44734)
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Lego-compatible railway truck, Bausteinwagen (Marklin 44734) |
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in storage |
A Lego-compatible model railway flatbed wagon base, part of the Marklin Start Up range, article no. 44734.
Specifications
The piece is a nicely heavy HO-scale flatbed wagon with two four-wheel bogeys with sprung couplings, whose upper surface is a thin 144mm × 32mm red plastic plate (clipped in place) with an eighteen-stud by four-stud array of Lego-compatible bumps.
Design problems
The biggest limitation of the design (what makes the design genuinely technically stupid) is the eighteen-stud length.
This was presumably a compromise, it's neither long enough for a really satisfying passenger carriage (which would probably want to be 24-studs long), and it's way too long for a short, stubby container wagon. And, maddeningly, there's nothing you can do about it.
If someone had just put a little more thought into the product, they'd have realised that, since it will always be used with additional bricks stuck to the top, the smart thing to have done would have been to supply the flatbed as two six--by-four plates, each with their own bogey and coupling, that could be placed closer or further apart, and fixed to the bottom of whatever the user was building. The half-pieces would have been cheaper to make, more flexible, would have let people build things like well wagons, and allow the middle section to be omitted, so that the piece used less material. Perhaps the lower cost (due to the smaller mouldings and omitted middle) might have allowed a central Lego-compatible bridging plate to be included at the same price.
This pieces shows that whoever designed the part, to appeal to Lego enthusiasts, simply didn't understand enough about Lego and Lego concepts. This is a Marklin product designed by someone who didn't really understand what they were doing.
Oh, and it's only available with a red upper surface. Marklin include the flatbed as part of their Lego-compatible wagon and train set kits, but because the resulting red side-stripe can be annoying when it's built into a model, those kits include an all-black version. You just can't buy the all-black version, on its own. Sigh.
General incompatibility
The model railway world is founded on the principle of compatibility. This is why model railways remain an enduring hobby while slot-car systems (where every other manufacturer had their own incompatible system) mostly disappeared, leaving just a few survivors. On the face of it, the idea of producing OO-HO bases with a four-stud-wide, tying together two different hobbies by making them compatible, was a brilliant idea, and deserved to do incredibly well.
However, we can't help wondering whether someone at Marklin hated the idea and deliberately tried to make it fail.
The thing that completely sabotages the Marklin Bausteinwagen, and makes it unsellable in most markets in the world is that some ... genius ... at Marklin decided to give it metal wheels and metal axles with no insulation. This isn't a problem if you are running it on Marklin's own three-rail centre-conductor track. But the majority of OO-HO model railway users around the world are using two-rail track, and if you place this wagon on a two-rail system, it'll immediately short-circuit the power and (if left in position) possibly damage the power supply. This means that no toy shop of general toy supplier (that might like to sell both Lego and model railways) will dare stock the item.
Since there is no warning on the box' that this piece of rolling-stock cannot be used on a powered two-rail system, and may burn out a two-rail power supply, this item is not just NOT electrically compatible with over 90% of model railway users' layout, or almost any current model railways sold outside of Germany ... it's not just useless to most model railway users – it's actually something potentially damaging that a retailer would actively not want to even have on their shelves or in their inventory.
This is unforgivable.
Consequently, a unique product that should have been a mass-market item that overlapped between two major hobby sectors is in effect only usable by people who have three-rail (or clockwork, or battery-powered) systems. Not only does this piece of idiocy mean that something that should have been a sure-fire winner is now a "turkey", its failure on the market will deter other manufacturers from trying anything similar, because "Marklin tried that, and it didn't sell".
The truly crazy thing here is that there is no technical reason for a modern piece of unpowered OO/HO rolling stock to have metal wheels and shorting axles. We assume, in the Twenty-First Century, that no model railway manufacturer would ever be so stupid as to try selling unpowered OO-HO gauge rolling stock that couldn't be used on two-rail, for no obvious reason other than simple bloody-mindedness. Granted, perhaps their market for other bits of rolling-stock is 100% Marklin 3-rail, but to do this to a potentially "breakout" product? Something at Marklin's management must be very, very wrong.
Yes the wheels are easily changeable, and can be popped out and swapped for other wheels ... but the DC wheel sets suggested by Gaugemaster cost about ten pounds (for four wheels on two axles?), so replacing all eight wheels to make the wagon what it should have been in the first place, might end up costing you more than the price of the wagon itself.
Conclusions
Full marks to someone at Marklin for wanting to make this item, but negative marks for the implementation.
Making your own Lego-compatible bases isn't too difficult. It's possible to buy bulk packs of nylon bogies and wheels really cheaply, and then use a hot glue gun to fix a pivot post to the bottom of a Lego plate ... after which all you really need is the couplings.
It would have been very nice and convenient to be able to buy something like that off-the-shelf. Unfortunately, Marklin blew it. We probably will be using this wagon on our layout, but we'll likely be changing the wheels, hacksawing out the middle section, painting the red edges black, and changing the couplings.
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