Lego + Brio Hybrid Wooden Railway (lets Call It BREGO!)

When my son was around four years old, we loved to play with his wooden railway. But sometimes we were bored with the limited number of cars we had. There was a big box of lego bricks there. So why couldn't we make more cars from all those lego bricks we had? The problem was, that we couldn't find any lego wheels that would run in those wooden rails.

So we started to adapt the two seemingly incompatible systems...

Step 1: Put Lego Stubs on Brio Cars

Our first approach was to modify a regular chassis from brio. We took the one from our container car (e.g. BRIO33562), cut off the two wooden dowels, which point upward from the chassis, and screwed a lego 4 x 6 plate onto the chassis. Note that its important to carefully countersink the screw heads, so that they don't interfere with any other bricks you'd want to put on top of the plate. That was our brego no1 - the right one pictured above.

Step 2: Advanced Brego

After playing around for some time I came up with design number two - the advanced brego car.

It is put together from two wood blocks 10 x 20 x 24 mm which carry one pair of wheels and a magnet each, and seven pieces of lego. The lego parts are three 2 x 4 plates and four 1 x 2 plates. which I glued together permanently with superglue.

As to wheels and magnets, we were lucky to find some original brio parts at one of our favourite toy shops. I think it should be easy to use some other kind of small magnets and to improvise with some narrow toy wheels.

I took a 10 x 20 mm stick of beech wood, marked off 24 mm intervals, and drilled holes for the axles halfway between the marks on a small drill press. Then I cut the stick into small blocks on the mark, sanded and varnished. Finally I glued and screwed the blocks to the lego parts, and installed wheels and magnets.