Isn’t it weird how trains and Christmas seem to have such a close association? Whether that’s down to unwrapping a train set on the big day, or Santa Claus becoming a railway magnate to help distribute presents, we couldn’t say. Either way – festive trains have also been a regular feature of LEGO’s product lineup over the years, including two at minifigure scale. This October 4th, you’ll be able to add a third engine to the Winter Village train shed, for the princely sum of US $129.99 | CAN $149.99 | UK £109.99. In some ways, it’s the same old story – but at the same time, there are big changes afoot among this set’s 956 pieces. Got your tickets ready? We’re travelling first class on the TBB Review Special of 10361 Holiday Express Train!
LEGO Icons 10361 Holiday Express Train | 956 Pieces | Available October 4 | US $129.99 | CAN $149.99 | UK £109.99
The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
The build
The train is presented on the box with a distinctively un-festive black background. But that’s not what caught my eye – that blue train element at the front looks intriguing…
… And sure enough, the reverse confirms that this is a 3D-printed element! We’ll take a look at that closely later on. Colour me interested.
It’s presented in a little blue gift-wrapped box, which I think is a very cute touch.
That present is opened early, as the small gifts and a station halt are our first stops. The microscale town is fun. I like the trees, made possible by a new dark green re-colour of the carrot element. No train here – we’ll take a closer look at that in a moment!
The big locomotive and its tender are next, forming the bulk of the set (three of the six bags are used up here). It includes a feature to raise and lower the chimney as the train goes along.
This is how it works. It’s pretty simple: a nice compact cam hidden inside the front bogie. Even though the bogie pivots to follow the track, the cam is at the centre, so in theory, it will work whichever way the train is pointing.
One of the two carriages also has a cam to wiggle things as we go, this time with a different cam design. This will eventually become a polar bear. Its head will nod, and the yellow axle waves the arms at the same time.
A caboose/passenger car sits at the back of the train. It’s a very simple design – you’ll get to see it in a minute. But for now, we have far more exciting things to cover!
At last, 3D printed LEGO!
When I left university a few years ago, I remember applying for a job at LEGO that had a job title along the lines of ‘additive manufacturing [i.e. 3D printing] engineer’. I didn’t get the job, but in my current line of work I do deal with 3D printed parts almost daily. So this new element is most fascinating to me. This is the first time a wide-release production part has used the technology.
Why did I qualify it that way? Because it’s not the first time LEGO has 3D printed parts. That honour goes to an Inside Tour set from 2019 – a very limited release. More relevant in this case is the second such piece: a duck, which was available for a short time from the Minifigure Factory at LEGO House. (Brickset, among others, took an informative look at that one.) That duck had a mechanism to open and close its mouth as it rolled along. This train uses a very similar one to move the chimney up and down, just like the other train in this set.
While LEGO haven’t printed many parts, there have been plenty of 3rd parties making LEGO compatible elements. Perhaps the most prevalent use is for train tracks and wheels, so it’s appropriate that a train is the first thing to be printed by LEGO themselves. In fact, I have some custom track of my own!
This presents a nice comparison between two different technologies. The track is made using solid deposition modelling (SDM); material is gradually added, layer by layer. This is evidenced by looking at the underside – a lower resolution of printing has been used to save material (and therefore cost) where it’s not needed. This is the most widespread type of printing, and therefore cheap. But it can be tricky to get tight tolerances, particularly on large elements. And of course, LEGO elements rely on these tiny tolerances for clutch power.
The train, however, appears to be made using Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). Essentially, a laser pointed at a bed of powdered material (plastic in this case) fuses the shape together. It’s a newer tech, so generally more expensive, but can get more consistent results with small geometry. However, there’s a notable absence of studs on this little blue train – there are three 3.18mm bar connections, plus a whole for the feather in the chimney. I guess these presented the best compromise for repeated use with 3D printing.
That’s it for my analysis of this fascinating new part. For more on LEGO’s history with 3D printing, our boffin pals over at New Elementary investigate with their usual depth. In the meantime, we have 955 other parts to check in on – so let’s move on to the minifigures.
The minifigures
Four minifigures join us on the journey to or from the North Pole: a conductor, an engineer, and two passengers. They’re all nice figures, but I love the conductor especially! He has an unprinted policeman’s cap, and a snazzy gold waistcoat with pocketwatch that just screams steampunk.
The two passengers get alternate faces, although with no real relation to each other, so I presume they’re re-uses from somewhere. Hey, we’ve all fallen asleep on a train at some point. Let’s just hope this lady doesn’t snore!
The finished model
So is the Holiday Express going to send us to sleep, or will it be a white-knuckle ride? Well, I can only just fit the included circle of track within my photography setup, so we’ll need to break things down to take a closer look!
Christmas normally brings a deluge of red and green, so I’m grateful the designers chose to mix it up and give the locomotive an attractive two-tone-blue colour scheme. What I’m less keen on is the complete absence of proper big train wheels for a steam train. After having seen so many good steamers in recent years, this feels like a regression to the design of the 9V My Own Train kits of the early 2000s. I have a good deal of nostalgia for those, but it can’t be denied they were, at best, mere approximations of a steam train.
Why is it like that? Presumably to make it easier to convert to Powered Up status. The motor bogie replaces the rear one, with the battery sitting in the tender. I would’ve preferred the tender to be extended to fit the motor underneath, with one or two pairs of proper driving wheels at the back of the engine.
Setting aside my inner train nerd’s irritations, I do like the rest of the design overall. There’s some nice detailing in the cab. The cloud element for the smoke is so neat I’ve already pilfered it for a train design of my own. The tender is normally used to store fuel for the engine, so the presence of that present on the back implies that this train burns gifts as fuel?! That seems rather counter-productive. Someone have a word with Santa!
The two wagons are small, but nevertheless provide some good play value. The caboose is mighty cramped but can still just about fit three to four figures. Linking and disconnecting the carriages is a bit of a faff with the Technic pins. Magnets would have been better, but I understand their exclusion.
Now this is a toy train, so we need to test it out on its layout! I don’t have any Powered Up kit, unfortunately, so hand power will have to do.
Any train set like this does feel somewhat incomplete without power functions – but in this case there’s another reason to miss it. As you can (sort of) see above, the moving chimney and polar bear are a bit stop-start. It might sound counter-intuitive, but the train is not heavy enough. The friction between the wheels and track isn’t always enough to overcome the resistance of the cam mechanisms. You can see that when we apply pressure on the wagons as we move it:
Much better! The same is true of the locomotive. Applying pressure on the back – i.e. where the motor’s weight would be going – makes the smoke stack move much more consistently.
Final thoughts
Although I was aware going into this that we’d seen Christmas trains before, I wasn’t prepared for just how similar in spirit this is to 10254 Winter Holiday Train. Both include a circle of track, a wagon with moving features (for better or worse), and the designs of the caboose and platform are similar almost to the point of being identical. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself – 10254 was a well-received addition to the Winter Village theme.
That said, what design changes are made feel a little like regressions, and it loses some charm as a result. Train heads are unlikely to find much favour with this set; it’s a perfectly decent toy train, but I think that playability could have been retained with a more realistic design. I certainly would have preferred that to the 3D printed part. While it’s fascinating from an engineering point of view, it feels like a bit of a gimmick. Its absence would not have been noticed. It’s difficult to say whether that part has affected the value proposition – considering there are also 16 track elements, $130 for 956 pieces doesn’t feel crazy. If you don’t own a winter village train already, then the Holiday Express still represents a decent option.
However! What if you want to motorise it? The extra Powered Up kit (88009, 88010 and 88011) adds about $80 to the bill if you don’t own them already. The combined price ends up in the same range as other train sets available in the LEGO City line, which include all that kit as standard. In fact, it ends up just a couple of dollars (and nearly 600 pieces) short of the similarly wintery 60470 Explorers’ Arctic Polar Express (US $209.99 | CAN $259.99 | UK £179.99). So if it’s a motorised train you want, LEGO City may represent a better entry point than the Holiday Express.
LEGO Icons 10361 Holiday Express Train | 956 Pieces | Available October 4 | US $129.99 | CAN $149.99 | UK £109.99
The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
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