Remember how my quest for Lion Knights’ castle started out? I was lacking two out of three baseplates, the green 16×22 kind in that case. It actually took me two months (unfortunate shipping delays) to get the requisite plates and start building the base. According to Peeron, only four LEGO sets featured that particular plate.

Yesterday I decided to check where I stand on starting the 7740 Electric Inter-City Train. Let me tell you, not much better – in fact, worse. The train has four main elements: the locomotive, two passenger wagons and the station platform. First three are based on black 6×28 train bases, the platform topped by an old grey 6×24 plate (building starts from the top) – Peeron lists only nine sets with the latter, mostly from the late 1960s (later than my vintage stuff) and early 1980s. And the train bases are not all that common either, although there are some compatible variants out there to add to those numbers.

And obviously I have none of those sets or plates. Now, I’m not surprised about the train bases, but no matter the lessons learned, I still expected to have the grey 6×28. It looks so… ordinary. Nope, no luck there. I guess I’m slowly learning how diverse even the decades old LEGO brick selection was.