Lego live steam locomotive.

It's been a while since I've built a Lego chassis for my Midwest steam engine. So when Eric offered to lend me some BBB wheels, I jumped at the opportunity to build a locomotive that could go through curves and switches without problems (My previous attempts used double flanged wheels).
The result is a somewhat original design: two half chassis running on four wheel each. The front chassis supports the steam engine and the exhaust oil trap. The rear chassis supports the boiler, burner and gas tank.
The two halves are connected by a pivot point. The wheels of each chassis are equalized. Power is transferred from the steam engine through a chain drive to a series of two jack shafts to a pair of final drives (one per half-chassis) made of a pinion driving a crown gear mounted on the inside axles. The outside axles are driven by the side rods.
Getting it to run took a while as I found out that I was almost out of gas (an "almost empty" canister had just enough gas left for the test run) and my only lighter failed to spark. The solution to the lack of spark was to light the lighter on my kitchen's gas range and then carrefuly carry the fire outside (I felt like a caveman...) to light the engine. I only had to do this exercise three times to complete the various tests.
As usual, click on the picture to see more (including a short movie) in the gallery.