What Has Brian Been Doing?

I haven't posted about this until now because it's been a secret all year. Last winter I started designing wooden trains to give to my kids, my nephews, and Kathy.  During the winter I looked at many pictures of wooden toy trains online. The tricky part, was to build interlocking cars.  I came up with a design for that and built 6 cars.  I had Joel and Rachel play with the cars (which were just flat bed cars) and found out a very important thing. 2 years olds try to push trains from the rear!  So I realized that I needed to make pull toys.  I tied a string to the front and wa-la! Joel could pull them around the house. I also figured out that it takes a long time to build each car so I decided that 3 cars per train would be adequate.  I started working on the engine and put some scrap pieces on one of the cars and brought it into work.  I got lots of opinions about what I could do so I made some adjustments and the following Monday I brought in an improved design. I think I talked to the people at work for 2 o3 different times before I settled on a design. I think it was April by then.  One of the trickiest parts was the smaller dome shaped piece right next to the smoke stack. I ended up needing to build a router table in order to get that done, and building the router table was a project in its self!  I finally got most everything cut out by summer time but found that sanding took a long time.  Anyway, I eventually got them all done and delivered. Here are some pictures of them.

The cargo cars turned out fairly nice. It took quite a while to cut all those rabbits, but the joints were nice and strong.

I really liked how the passenger cars turned out.  My first try on their design was simple, but I liked it so much I didn't try anything fancier.

After I had most of the trains built I found out that my nephew Titus does not play with vehicles much.  So I bought a scroll saw, which I had been wanting for a long time, and cut out animals to go in his train set.

I never had all 22 cars I built assembled at the same time, but I did get four trains together and strung them together for a gigantic train!