Without motor? Well that sucks.

Someone boosted the rims as well.

Not to be confused with 116, clearly the chadier train

What! There's no motor! that means it would actually involve you having to do something for it to move.

The perimeter of the wheels are notched the same as the ridges on the rails. I haven't noticed that before. Noice.

Just put it on top of a hill and let gravity do the work, there’s your locomotion!

They used color well on this. I kind of like the design of this, even though it was designd as a toy and not a 'collector's item' 'replica' of any real train. At least, AFAIK.

There is a charm to it, though I do prefer 126 over this. After all, even when that has no motor either, at least included a push.

@Maxbricks14 said:
"What! There's no motor! that means it would actually involve you having to do something for it to move."

*clutches pearls* What? You mean I have to expend my own energy to get this to move? What a shock! The Horror! Oh, the Humanity! How shall I ever recover!? Quick, someone get the vapors - I feel faint!

@Murdoch17: You mean someone get the smelling salts because you have the vapors.

Or maybe, add a motor?

@TheOtherMike said:
" @Murdoch17: You mean someone get the smelling salts because you have the vapors."

Eh, I was close.

There is an implication this is a sort of side-tank locomotive like an Orenstein and Koppel narrow gauge engine. The black with red wheels is very central-European with Germany, Denmark and Poland both following similar paint schemes. It's a good look to be fair, but personally I prefer my own black paint schemes in America (often black with occasional white or aluminum trim) or the black colors schemes in the UK on the LMS and BR (black with red and white trim paint).

That is though part of the inherent problem with train sets in general these days, every train fan is uniquely nationalist in ways we don't always admit. With the world's railways having such distinctly different design ideas in locomotives, rolling stock and even paint style, it means that for something to "look right" it needs to reflect what is local to the viewer. A big beefy 2-8-0 in black with some white trim and a boiler lifted above the frame is natural to my American eyes, but would (other than a wartime S160) seem alien to a European audience. Those localization problems can cause issues beyond aesthetics as well, look at what happened to the S160's when they arrived in the UK only to suffer a string of boiler explosions because the UK train crews were not familiar with reading the US standard water gauges. It's not that the design was flawed (well at least in that particular aspect), the water gauges were familiar to American operators but translated overseas and it became a deadly liability.

As much as I would love to see LEGO do more trains, sets like this speak of an era when LEGO could comfortably do trains with a focus on a Danish and German audience (was LEGO sold behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany at the time? Random thought in my mind...). With so much of the LEGO audience in the US and Asia now, I don't see how LEGO could really do general trains to please everybody on a regular basis without globe hopping their designs frequently.

Other than the BNSF, Santa Fe Super Chief, and the Maersk train; as an American I often feel like LEGO has pigeon-holed our entire railroad history into "the Wild West" and while I love the 19th century designs and the history of the First Transcontinental Railroad and subsequent railroad lines myself, I feel like LEGO picked a "generic American" era that would be familiar to global audiences. It means some of the interesting stuff (just look at how often Big Boy ends up on LEGO Ideas again and again) gets brushed aside for not fitting into the era LEGO has seemingly picked as it's American train representation. In turn, we really don't get Germanic steam trains either and stuff like this RSOTD seems long past us.

@AverageChimaEnjoyer said:
"Without motor? Well that sucks."
Why should it have a motor? It's clearly a steam engine...

@AustinPowers said:
"Why should it have a motor? It's clearly a steam engine... "

Imagine a company like Wilesco making a Lego compatible steam engine...though I think the biggest challenge wouldn't so much be to make it small enough to fit, but more to prevent everything around it from melting....

But as a compromise, this is quite cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jYsBSGbo1Y

@xboxtravis7992:
It’s actually worse in the US, since it breaks down to regional lines. A hobby train club could grow to a decent size without any overlap, and in fact if you try to join one that’s large enough, you might be told (possibly in jest) that you have to start buying the least popular line because all the others have been spoken for.

My LUG has been displaying next to the 1601 Allegheny for about 15 years, and two members have built a combined three Big Boys, but I’ve yet to hear anyone pipe up about making a MOC of the more powerful Allegheny.

@GSR_MataNui said:
"Not to be confused with 116 , clearly the chadier train "

Yeah, people are not grasping that 116 is the same loco _with_ a motor.

'Locomotive without motor', I thought this RSOTD would be Orient Express....

@PurpleDave said:
"Someone boosted the rims as well."

See, https://naptownnerd.blogspot.com/2013/12/vacation-retrospective-national.html?m=1

(4th picture down)