Like many men my age, at heart, I don’t necessarily feel all that different from when I was six years old and playing with my LEGO train. Besides LEGO and trains, as a boy, I liked fire engines, diggers and trucks, preferably with lots of lights. My latest build still fits that pattern. It is a Mercedes Actros truck with a stepframe trailer, as operated by the Dutch company Mammoet, which is Dutch for mammoth.

They specialize in heavy lifting and transport of oversized and heavy objects. So, by their standards, this truck is actually quite small. Their vehicles have an attractive and distinctive color scheme. It uses a lot of red, but the vehicles’ cabs are usually black. The trailer, built by the Dutch company Nooteboom, has a yellow edge for increased visibility. When I started building the truck, I wasn’t sure what load I’d put on the trailer, except that I wanted it to be predominantly yellow. Ultimately I picked a Liebherr wheel-loader with nicely chunky wheels. As a display base for some future LEGO event, I also built part of a road, which I decorated with some flowers and two road signs, both of which (would you believe it?) I already had as a six-year-old.