The PRETTIEST Model Train Ever Review

This thing is the prettiest model train in the world and a lot of brick-building fans and train enthusiasts are going to be excited to see this.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to our blog. It's Victor from the Nifeliz team here. Nifeliz's sets are not Lego but compatible.

What we have here today is this attractive model steam train. First things first, we're going to learn about its details.

 

— Set details —

This one is called Nifeliz GWR 2900 Class Steam Train Building Kit. It consists of 789 pieces and came out in 2022. This is a modified version of the Great Western Railway 2900 Class. On the box, this says it's recommended for ages 16 and up and as you can see, it looks beautiful. Steam train toy bricks are pretty hard to find, so we got pretty lucky with this one. So let's not wait around. I'm just going to open it up and show you guys what’s inside.

And now for the moment of truth: we have got an instruction manual, a whole bunch of pieces and some tracks. Most of the parts are held within three different bags, so we have got bag number 1, bag number 2 and bag number 3. Next up, I'm going to count the little bags inside each of them. 

Here we go. One, two, three, four, five and six. There are six little bags inside bag number 1.

Here's bag number 2. One, two, three, four and five. There are five bags inside.

Bag number 3 is the last bag and we have one, two, three, and four. So there's not that much. 

— Completion —

Hey, guys. Welcome back. And here's a completed build and I've got to say this is a really nice set. We’ve got 30 pages of instructions. The instructions are really clear and look pretty good. My little boy, Justin helped me with this build today, which is pretty awesome. This thing took us a while to make. Meanwhile, we had a few breaks, like a lunch break and whatnot. Though at first, he was already making the rails on his own, later on, Justin showed a little lack of enthusiasm there, so it had to become a daddy's job to build the rest of the train and then let him play with it.

So we just took everything out of bag number 1. There was not a huge variety of colors, so it was pretty easy to separate everything. When we just finished the last step of bag number 1, step number 37, we got the steam engine.

After we got everything unbagged from bag number 2, there was all the different colors, black, red, two shades of red. Progress was going pretty good. While we were with the last step for the tender, step 72, we just had one more set of wheels to pop on there. As we finished bag number 2, we got the first passenger coach and the tender.

Then bag number 3 was the last passenger coach. So we got those little bags opened up and sorted out. After that, we got all our colors separated out and we were ready to go with the second passenger coach at step 74. Finally, we got everything set up and connected and so we got the finished product, all coupled up together.

— About GWR 2900 Class —

The Great Western Railway 2900 Class, sometimes referred as Saint Class, was built by the Great Western Railway’s Swindon Works incorporated several series of 2-cylinder passenger steam locomotives designed by George Jackson Churchward and built between 1902 and 1913 with differences in the dimensions. The majority of these were built as 4-6-0 locomotives; but thirteen examples were built as 4-4-2 (but converted to 4-6-0 during 1912/13). They proved to be a successful class which established the design principles for GWR 2-cylinder classes over the next fifty years.

After finally converting the last broad gauge lines in 1892, the Great Western Railway (GWR) began a period of modernization as new cut-off lines shortened its routes to west of England, South Wales and Birmingham. During the first decade of the twentieth century the Chief Mechanical Engineer, George Jackson Churchward, designed or acquired a number of experimental locomotives with different wheel arrangements and boiler designs to help him plan for the future motive power needs of the railway. The first of these was a two-cylinder 4-6-0 locomotive, designed in 1901 whilst Churchward was still the Chief Assistant of his predecessor William Dean.

— Features —

You know as a side note, I discovered that I definitely saved time and money when I got my model sets delivered from Nifeliz. I did a lot of ordering on Bricklink and sometimes I spent over $100 on an order and that was not even 400 pieces worth of bricks, maybe 300 pieces. And not only that, but also I usually spent a couple of weeks buying the pieces separately from five or ten different sellers at shipping costs, of course and then trying to piece them together. After that, if you were to build it on your own, good luck figuring out the instructions because I've done that before. I wasted two days or even four days trying to build something exactly like a Nifeliz set. However, considering that Nifeliz has an instruction manual and everything, getting a set done is just plain easy. All you need to do is buying it and building it with the instructions.

Again, the actual Nifeliz system was utilized for this set, you know, actually building universal ones to make more realistic trains. Therefore, as for the styling, Nifeliz GWR 2900 Class Steam Train Building Kit is a great build, real similar to the actual Great Western Railway 2900 Class. In fact, it is really cute! I'm head over heels.

Now let’s dive into all of the features of of this thing.

It consists of three different sections. Up front, we've got the steam engine, then we have the tender and finally the passenger coaches.

— The steam engine —

The engine is an exquisite build and comes in the signature black color complete with red and gold details. 

Here we go then. First, looking at the front side, the front end is really good-looking.

There's a nice printed dish element on the front. That's a really nice custom printed element.

Underneath this element, we've got two headlights in the front. They are two little round clear pieces, but look very cute and certainly seem real.

In front of these headlights, we've got a couple of brick-built buffers at the front. They are absolutely gorgeous.

Between the buffers, we've got this little center bit here so that there's actually a way to lock these front wheels in place. You just push this down and actually lock them in place and then, it will not go from side to side. There's a little bit of wiggle in there, but it's perfect for general play. A lot of kids are not going to be placing this onto actual rails, so basically if you want those wheels to stay facing forward, then they'll just stay like that. 

This train fits onto both Nifeliz official tracks and Lego ones, so you can place this onto any generation of tracks that they’ve ever done. If you want to put this onto one of those tracks, you will have to just rotate this little center bit up and unlock the front truck. That way, the front truck will be able to slide from side to side. It is very important to have this movement because it enables your train to go through the tightest turns on those tracks. 

Taking a look at the sides, it's very accurate-looking. 

The shaping of the whole boiler is pretty good to me. 

Just like the real things, we've got gold pipes towards the back. The pipe work along the side of the engine is seamlessly integrated.  

Like the actual locomotive, it features the correct 4-6-0 wheel configuration. So this immediately looks much more like a proper classic real steamer as opposed to just a steam body placed on top of a diesel-electric or even purely electric chassis like some other model trains did. 

This also allows a proper alignment with these kind of fender flares that go above the driving wheels. 

Like the real train, there's a set of four smaller truck wheels at the front.

The main driving wheels are about an inch in diameter and come with working coupling rods, one on either side. There's no real cylinder detail to go with that, but it's much better to have that than not because now when you roll this back and forth, you can actually see those coupling rods sliding on either side. It looks more real and more like it's alive.

One thing I found interesting is that the central driving wheels are actually slightly different to the other four. They're missing the flange, which helps keep the train on the rails.

On top, we've got a few metallic gold elements, which really makes this set feel special. One of them is a little headlight that moves around. 

I'm definitely not a steam engine expert, but if I had to have a guess, I would say one of these is going to be the chimney. It looks pretty cool.

And then, of course, we've got the steam dome and sand dome. Those are identical. 

In order to be able to look inside the enclosed driver's cab in the back, I'm going to derail the locomotive just momentarily. And then, you can see how these connect here just using some of those Technic elements. It's not the magnetic couplers. This uses 1×3 rounded beams clicked into place. 

At the back, the detail is really nice.

The first thing I want to mention is it has this canopy that looks like a tarpaulin and is fastened down onto the driver's cab. It is very detailed.

There are two little windows in the walls, one for each side. They are both are composed of rectangular clear plastic pieces and so you can peer through the window. How interesting!

Below the windows are the 3440 number plates on the outer wall, which are printed pieces complete with gold details. They just look nice. 

If we look down towards the bottom here, we have some steps to help the driver get inside, which are represented by two black tiles with three grilles that hook on via two studs. They just thought of everything in this set. 

There's actually a small cabin here. The roof can come off to reveal the interior details and you can see in there a little bit better.

In spite of how small this is, it has it all inside. You can see there are a few valves there. 

We've also got some printed dials that are showing some pressures or temperatures. 

There's even a small firebox with flames coming out. 

So that is the steam engine, which is obviously a great lead car.

— The tender —

Just behind the steam engine, this is the tender, which is usually used to hold coal. Though it’s kind of tiny, the design of it is kind of clean.  

There is an opening compartment at the top of the tender where you can see the plates are covered in studs so that it looks like coal .

It has the hinge there, the little piece that you can pull up. 

Look inside. I'm sure Justin will be filling this up with lots of goodies. 

There are two large printed pieces emblazoned with the logos, just one on either side. I love the details of them.  

And there are four wheels, which incorporate some interesting molding design to make the wheels look like they're on springs. 

— The passenger coaches —

Now the next two cars that we have are the two passenger coaches. I know everybody—including myself—would like to see more than one passenger coach, so it's nice that they have two coaches for this. They're identical. Both of them look really good although they do have a simple look to me. 

The roof is shaped pretty well. It is also easily removable. There you go. And it stays together, which doesn't always happen. So it's very revealing when you just pop that whole module off, which is definitely a nice feature.

As you can see, there are four windows on either side. These are the modern windows that have the square corners rather than the rounded corners.

Underneath the windows, there is a nice band of dark tan colors there, running the full length of the side panel.

The ends are shaped up very nicely. It's an open concept and you can see through there. In my opinion, it's interesting they used the tall black door frames for these entrances. That's nice because you don't see these parts very frequently. 

So the roof is a module and so is the side panel, which is definitely pretty awesome. If you want to see the interior of this, you're in luck. I usually would show you this from the top and bring a little extra light in there, but there's a bonus that the designer brought in for this. That is, in my opinion, absolutely fantastic. You just pop the entire wall off. This is now a feature that I want to see on not only every single model passenger train, but I also want to see on every single model vehicle that is able to carry more than two figures inside. Even if you have small fingers, it's still a little bit of a pain sometimes to play around with a function in a small space like that. So being able to pop that off is great. This has been designed very thoughtfully. It's both for the sake of play and for the sake of display. Let's take a look. Whoa. So each coach has four seats, so you can get four people in there.

The interior's features are really limited by the scale of the build. There's not a whole lot of space in there. It's only four studs wide, but your seats take up over two studs. We do have a couple of booths where we can seat our figures. You'll notice we don't have any chairs in here, but you've  got the armrest and the side trim there. 

I especially love the colors of the interior. We've just got some brown tiles there for people to sit or stand on. They've used sand blue as the color for the trim. They look so beautiful!

The interior also features the sand blue tiles in the base of it to make it look a little bit nicer. And those tiles also are important to help you to slide a cart back and forth on that. I think that looks really good especially with the sand blue flooring. 

The only minor problem is that the leading wheels, the tender wheels and the passenger coach wheels do not roll well on a smooth surface. They just need a little force or surface friction. As a result, they roll pretty well on the carpet or a cloth or paper. 

— Summary —

All in all, Nifeliz GWR 2900 Class Steam Train Building Kit is the prettiest model train I have ever seen. It is actually one of the prettiest display pieces. Obviously you can tell from images. I'm in love with it. Its looks are top shelf! 

The steam engine is very nicely proportioned. I like the color choices of it. The red and gold details make the black engine look more appealing. The smokestack looks cool. Also, the 4-6-0 wheel configuration is close to the actual train. 

And then, I love the large printed piece on either side of the tender. I think they did a great job with that.

Finally, the side panel of the passenger coach pulls off so that this train car becomes a kind of movie set and you've got the great color scheme going on with the interior. It is super cute!

It was easy to build and I think most of the pieces just blend together seamlessly with the rest of the train, but as I've shown you guys, one problem with this train is that some wheels don't roll very well on a smooth surface. Since I'm not going to be using it that much for anything and my little boy, Justin is going to be pulling the train around on the floor, still it's fine. I still love it. 

Overall, it is just a great-looking set. This would be a great display piece for the background or on a desk or on a bookshelf or something like that because you can never go wrong with displaying a beautiful model train. I absolutely love it. I'm happy I got it.

Here is the link to get this:

Nifeliz GWR 2900 Class Steam Train On Amazon

And for more interesting builds, click the link below: 

Nifeliz Official Amazon Shop

So thank you for reading, guys. I hope this review was a help. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.

Bye-bye. Adios.