Good news: the LEGO Orient Express can be motorised after all

The LEGO Group has claimed that 21344 The Orient Express Train can't handle motorisation – but it hasn’t taken the fan community long to prove the designers wrong.

According to LEGO Ideas Design Manager Jordan Scott, the team responsible for transforming Thomas Lajon’s submission into the final product ‘tried as hard as [they] could’ to make the train ready for motorisation with Powered Up elements. The official line is that 21344 The Orient Express Train is ‘too heavy’ for LEGO motors, so getting it to run smoothly would have required ditching one of its two carriages.

YouTuber Balazs (also known as RacingBrick) has now put the LEGO Group’s claims to the test by trying out several different ways to motorise 21344 The Orient Express Train – with positive results. Balazs starts by comparing the weight of the new train to LEGO City’s 60336 Freight Train, which is motorised right out of the box. The LEGO Ideas locomotive and carriages total 1,864g, while the City train’s loco and cars come to 1,112g.

Together, the Orient Express’s sleeping and dining cars come to roughly twice the weight of the trucks intended to be pulled by the freight engine. But the City locomotive has no problems pulling the Orient Express’s carriages, running just as fast as when pulling its own wagons. It can also pull the tender – suggesting that if the Orient Express’s dark blue engine can be powered in the same way, it should be able to handle its carriages just fine.

Balazs’s first attempt to independently motorise the Ideas train comes from fellow YouTuber Stud City, who suggests swapping the bogey on the front of the first carriage for the train motor from 60336 Freight Train. He then places the CONTROL+ hub into the tender, which has a perfect gap for it already (as if it was designed that way intentionally). This solution has limited results: the weight of the hub and force of the motor cause the tender to frequently derail.

The next logical step is to motorise the locomotive instead, possible solutions for which have already been floated by train fans over on LEGO forum Eurobricks. Balazs incorporates a large linear motor into the dark blue engine, connects it to the hub (still in the tender) through the cab, then loads up the profile for 2020’s 10277 Crocodile Locomotive in the CONTROL+ app. This is a non-starter, though: the train doesn’t have enough traction, and the wheels on the locomotive simply turn in place.

Fortunately, Balazs is able to borrow another solution from a previous train set, adding the red elastic bands from the Crocodile to the wheels of the Orient Express. And hey presto: the train now runs smoothly around a simple oval track. It’s not quite as fast as 60336 Freight Train, but it does the job without coming off the rails (bar a single slip of the tender several minutes in) or staying in one place. It can also reverse, albeit at a slower speed (this solution is less successful for pushing than pulling).

“As a proof of concept, I think we can agree that the train can be motorised with a small City hub and a large motor,” Balazs says. “It’s not perfect and might have some rare issues reversing, but I’m sure the train community will come up with something reliable very soon after release.”

If you want to motorise your own copy of 21344 The Orient Express Train once you have it in hand, you’ll obviously need to add your own electronics (sold separately) and likely a handful of other pieces to accommodate the motor inside the locomotive – but the fact that it’s possible at all should remove one major obstacle for train fans frustrated with the final product.

The question now – as Balazs asks in his video above – is: why didn’t the LEGO Group include the necessary motors to begin with? It’s tough to say for sure, but Balazs speculates that the components may have pushed the price of the train beyond what the company thought the market would tolerate, especially with one eye on the RRP of LEGO Ideas’ other motorised sets (21323 Grand Piano and 21335 Motorised Lighthouse).

If you don’t already have the necessary equipment in hand, though, you might be waiting a while to pick it up through official channels. Powered Up components have scattershot availability at LEGO.com, and are currently on back order in some regions, out of stock in others and – in some cases – not listed on the website at all. But there’s always BrickLink…

21344 The Orient Express Train launches December 1 for £259.99 / $299.99 / €299.99. Click here to check out our review.

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