Mr. GeoK carefully plans his Lego shopping to best take advantage of bonus giveaways, loyalty points and discounts. Which means every November for the past several years he’s left a little gift on my desk – the annual holiday bonus set(s) from Lego! In 2014 and 2013 there were two holiday bonus sets available, so he had to be especially organized with his shopping list. This year, Lego reverted to a single holiday bonus set in its North American stores IRL and online: a Christmas Train, set 40138. Sure enough, some time towards the end of October it was sitting on my computer keyboard one morning.

The unopened set beckoned from the corner of my desk for a few weeks. The temptation finally became too strong to resist. I grabbed the box and camera and headed down to the basement where I hauled out my homemade white box and enjoyed a half hour of fun.

I opted to take a photo every 10 steps or so, with the aim of giving a bit of a sense for the complexity of the build – not very complex, but some creative use of pieces to achieve a fairly refined look for such a small model. Here it is, ordered from top to bottom, starting with the left column, then the middle column, then the right column.

The finished set includes an engine, a coal car and a caboose along with a signal and a small Christmas tree.

It’ll be interesting to see how this fits in with all of the other Winter Village Lego sets and holiday bonus sets from prior years. I think the scale might be a little challenging. It’s definitely too small to be scaled for minifigs (which explains why there aren’t any in the set). But it’s much too large to be “toy scale” for Winter Village. I’m hoping it’ll work okay as something along the lines of a G-scale (garden scale) train set IRL. I’ll try to remember to post a photo of our complete Winter Village once it’s set up.

Thanks Mr. GeoK, for the most recent addition to our growing collection of Christmas Lego sets! It’s pretty cute. Now, I wonder what I can make from the leftover pieces?