A Totally Normal Train Station

The Train station in Totally Normal Town isn't much to write home about. It's just the Winter Village train station set #10259 with some minor alterations:

1. I removed all of the snow and Christmas decorations to make it a Summer train station.

2. I changed the orientation of the tracks to make it fit better in its lot in Totally Normal Town.

3. I changed the names of the railway company and the destinations.

You can see that we used the acronym "SMCPTNT" throughout our railway system. This is a riff on the acronym of the French national railway system "SNCF" (la Société nationale des chemins de fer). Ours is "la Société municipale des chemins de plastique de Totally Normal Town."

The train is also a set: it's set #10254, the Winter Holiday Train. I think I did not buy this set (just built it from existing pieces from my collection) since there are a lot of substitutions -- notably I made the locomotive yellow instead of green.

I love trains and train travel, so I'm not super thrilled with how car-centric Lego cities tend to be. I only managed to include this one little train line to the magic portal in this incarnation of Totally Normal Town.

Maybe I'll succeed in integrating better public transit in the next round.

The candy shop is even less interesting -- it's just set #31077 with no alterations at all.

When I show this town to guests, I usually ask them which buildings they think are sets and which are my original designs. They rarely guess correctly.

As fun as that game is, though, I think I'll try to avoid including buildings that are just purchased sets in future iterations of this town.

A Tower with a Magic Train Portal!

 This is probably my favorite building that I designed and built for Totally Normal Town. As you can see, it's a castle tower that is built into a rugged rock formation with a waterfall trickling down the side into a stream or small lake with a cave and a little foot-bridge (with a little frog habitat on the other side).

The waterfall was originally inspired by a waterfall in the "Mountain Hut" 3-in-1 constructor set which I'd already improved on in my custom version from 2014.

Here's a more detailed view where you can see the entrance to the cave:

A few cool things about this design:

1. The train tracks go into a cave that contains a magic portal (that was designed and built by Nico). He also made some additional matching magic portals so that we can play that the train goes into the portal and comes out in other places where we've built Legos in our apartment.

2. The top two segments of the tower can be removed so that you can look into the rooms inside.

3. The top cone of the tower looks like a specialized piece that would only make sense as a tower-topper -- at least I like to joke that it is. Most people correctly guess that it's the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.

Here are some more pictures that showcase the complete build:

Welcome to Totally Normal Town!

It's finally time to document Totally Normal Town because it looks like our little town "has the Grim" again...

Totally Normal Town was founded in 2018 when I bought a set of three serving tables to place under the stairs and build Legos on.

In the town's first incarnation, we simply gathered up all of the built Lego sets that we had on shelves and dressers around our apartment and placed them together on this table. The town got its name because it's so totally normal to have such an eclectic collection of buildings such as our apartment building, two castles (one medieval, one ice), a chunk of Atlantis, a snake-head building, Hogwarts, etc.

The town was named (and destroyed) in a 2018 video in which the kids' Divination teacher Professor Trelawney predicted that "the whole town has the Grim"! (Yes, the kids were attending Hogwarts since it was the only school in Totally Normal Town.)

Immediately after this tea-leaf divination, the entire town was totally destroyed by a series of attacks from different vehicles -- beginning with Daisy Duck in a construct-o-mec and ending with the Millennium Falcon.

Yet Totally Normal Town is made of magical Christmas Legos -- hence can never truly stay destroyed. Over the rubble of the first version, a new Totally Normal Town was built (mostly by me, mostly in 2019).

Of course we always knew that (as is totally normal) our town would one day have the Grim again. It seems Professor Trelawney is projecting the next total town annihilation for October or November of this year. If it happens early enough, the town will rise again as a Christmas village before morphing into its third incarnation.

But I'm really proud of many of the buildings I designed and built, so I'd like to do a series of posts about them here with the label TotallyNormalTown.

And here are various views of the town as a whole: