Set #40262 Christmas Train Ride: The last year’s Christmas vignettes were designed to be connected together in a unique display of outdoor winter food stalls, decorations, gift delivering services and a nifty little three car train with ticket stand. Which is a much nicer touch compared to the past vignettes we’ve seen.

Box/Instructions

Box: This holiday box involves a decent looking image on the front showing the set and all elements from it while the back showcases every feature of the set. It is a highly impressive looking specialized box and the Christmas ornament on the front includes two lines to write to and from when giving this as a gift.

Instructions: The instructions shows the other set on the back while the rest shows all of the steps to build all of the elements of the vignettes. A decent looking manual design similar to the remaining vignettes of the year.

Minifigures

Barista: This gentleman is dressed in standard parts introduced by LEGO for a Barista… unfortunately the parts were definitely gender specific. Which means if you look hard enough you’ll wonder why this boy is dressed like a girl. Or who knows, maybe LEGO was aiming for the first Transgendered Minifigure and he’s about to finish with the medical procedures to complete the transformation. Hey, it’s your imagination, do with it what you will.

Driver: This gentleman is actually dressed as a Conductor and his print matches up with past Train set releases, which is great because this is the cheapest method for obtaining this particular torso print. He’s not bad, but like with most sets the figures are more generic looking because they share parts with everybody else.

Passenger: This little girl has Black Widow’s hair piece, as well as the same purple scarf with blue sweater that was included in one of the winter sets from last year. I seriously wish LEGO would stop using the curvy print designed torsos for children, it just looks wrong, either their midgets or somebody just refuses to make gender neutral torso prints for children.

The build & The completed model

This set is mostly a ton of stand-alone models meant to go together though don’t attach, so their build is relatively simple and easy to do. The element with the most steps is the Train itself which uses repetitive build techniques for the cars and some fun parts for the locomotive.

The two stands are using a fair number pieces as well, but are far more repetitive in their structure and so not as much fun to build as the train. When you finish building everything you can line them all up to make a fun little scene.

This scene is modular by design and so many elements can fit together in any way your imagination would enjoy. There’s a small food stand, a ticket stand to purchase tickets from the train, an outdoor picnic table, a small bench next to a lamppost with a map attached and an end piece with a tree on it so you can put it next to any of the other parts to finish how the scene looks.

The train runs back and forth in front of or around the display, overall all of these little models work together and looks great, especially once combined with the second set we’re about to discuss in our next review.

Overall opinion

This is a pretty good set and I definitely recommend getting both because with both sets you can build a very good scene when the Holidays roll around, in fact I’d say these little vignettes would fit in quite nicely with the Winter Village sub-theme of the Seasonal line. I do wish LEGO would start picking less generic and inappropriate torsos for their Minifigures in these sets however.