Train Wheel and Connecting Rod Coloring Page

Train Wheel and Connecting Rod Coloring Page takes one part off a locomotive and draws it at the size of a dinner plate. A driving wheel fills the top of the sheet on twelve tapered spokes, and from its crank pin a connecting rod runs straight down the page through a bearing block to a small end at the bottom. Most train wheel coloring pages give you a wheel under a train. This one is the wheel, alone, with room around it. Ages 8 to 12 and up. Free letter size PDF.

How this coloring page was created

The concept we entered on Colorin AI was: "A large train driving wheel with its connecting rod running down the page, every surface of both covered edge to edge with dense repeating decorative patterns, with no plain areas left anywhere." It came back print ready in seconds.

This is the one page in the collection where the generator did not do what was asked, and the result is better for it. The prompt called for dense decorative pattern over every surface. What came back is a clean engineering drawing with no ornament at all, closer to a parts diagram than to a zentangle. We kept it as it came, because the collection already holds three heavily patterned sheets and none that let the mechanism speak for itself. It is described here as what it is rather than as what was ordered.

Details of this train wheel coloring page

The whole sheet is one object photographed straight on, and it is the only page in the collection with real empty space in it. The lower third and both sides are white, so the wheel reads the way a specimen reads on a plate.

That emptiness is the reason to print it. It is a page for someone who wants a large shape and few decisions, or for anyone who would rather draw their own background around a subject than color a supplied one.

The count: the wheel rim is three concentric rings, and inside it twelve tapered spokes radiate from the hub, each spoke drawn with a second outline just inside its edge so it reads as a machined bar rather than a line. Between the spokes sit twelve rounded triangular openings, all identical apart from the two the crank throws across. The hub is a circle carrying six small bolt heads evenly spaced around a plain center boss. Below the hub the crank pin boss adds two more bolt holes and a pair of side lugs. The connecting rod runs the full lower height of the page as a tapered beam with a relief line down its middle, passing through a bearing block ringed by two bolts and flanked by straps, then narrowing to a small end that closes on a ring bearing with a wedge cotter through it. No decorative pattern appears anywhere on the sheet.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

The twelve openings are the picture, not the spokes. Color the gaps between the spokes rather than the spokes themselves and the wheel turns into a rosette. Color the spokes and it stays a diagram. Both work, but the first is the surprise.

Use the double outline on every spoke as a built in highlight. Leaving that inner strip white while the body of the spoke takes a mid tone gives you machined steel with no blending at all, and the drawing has already put the strip exactly where the light would sit.

Want to color your own? Turn a photo into a coloring page and print a wheel from a locomotive you have stood next to.