The Polar Express

The Polar Express is a heartwarming animated film based on the children's book by Chris Van Allsburg. It follows a young boy who embarks on a magical train journey to the North Pole on Christmas Eve. Throughout the journey, the boy is conflicted by his doubts and skepticism about the existence of Santa and the magic of Christmas. He grapples with his wavering belief, uncertain if what he's experiencing is real or just a dream. Along the way, he encounters various adventures and learns about the power of belief, friendship, and the spirit of Christmas.

The Polar Express was, and I suppose it still is, my favorite movie to see as a child. I became so accustomed to watching it so I've now made a tradition for myself to watch it every Christmas Eve.

Since I didn't actually own the scale model of the train when I was a kid, I used those little wooden trains to play out the movie's scenes. Since the scene with the ice lake was so fantastic, I used to create it quite a bit. I still come back to the movie in some shape or form, mostly by the soundtrack, which I listen to occasionally, especially during winter.

Having grown older, I can now design The Polar Express myself, rather than assembling a makeshift locomotive out of random Lego parts. Recently, I treated another moc of mine in the same way, that is, I was able to finally build in my on design—but The Polar Express is, in my opinion, a more worthwhile Lego Idea.

I tried to create The Polar Express as authentic as possible to the best of my ability, therefore my interpretation is more chronological in nature. Don't worry though, there are plenty of play features as well. This set isn't really intended for a lego city size layout, which is a plan with six wide trains, however The Polar Express should work great (presumably) as long as you can fit your Orient Express into your layout, you should be fine.

Let's talk about the train itself now.

If you wonder if the train can be powered up, don't worry, I've emptied out just enough space in the boiler for a motor to fit inside, specifically part number 58120c01. A receiver can be placed in the cab connecting the motor to the battery which can be placed in the tender. To be able to feed the motor cable to the receiver, just remove the coal intake so expose a hole to pull out the cable of the motor.

My model of the train closely resembles the one in the movie, particularly the passenger cars. I may have over done it when designing the engine and tender, using a sideways image of the Berkshire as reference. Although I've seen far better mocs of the locomotive, this is the best that I could have done. The tender was difficult, not in the sense that it was much of a challange, but every time I set out to work on it, I found myself making tiny changes to it. Since the Observation car was the first thing I designed connected to Polar Express, it was simple to design the Passenger car using it as a building block. All of this started with the Observation car. The only difficult thing about designing it was that every time I worked on it, I could always find a way to make it better, much like the process of making the tender.

The eight minifigures in the set are the only essential ones: Billy, the Hobo, Conductor, Know-it-all Kid, Hero Girl, and Hero Boy make up the remaining six. But I also wanted to include The Polar Express's two engineers, Smokey and Steamer.

(note, the minifig outfits aren't as detailed as they could be, I'm don't have any good editing software so I can't edit the characters textures well and make them look good. All I could do that looks ok is Know it all kids shirt)

Now for the play features. I included a great many of them.