zephyr1934

Thinking about this further, the serious wooden railroaders build their own (track, rolling stock, etc). That would be kind of neat, a "Thomas" style wooden railroad track for PF trains. You can buy the bits to make standard wooden rails, e.g., here and here, but the gauge and depth is all wrong for lego trains.

Looking good

Massive!

I doubt that the plywood would survive the elements in the garden, but the flexibility of the track reminds me of some fiberglass panels we had as kids. Perhaps there is something mass produced that could be easily appropriated (flashing, or ???) to a new task as lego track in the great outdoors.

I really like it. The fact that it is a completely passive control is fantastic. With three tracks (four switches) two of the tracks with these one way stoppers you could completely switch a train around. You would just have to shove through any time you wanted to pick up the cars on that track and run around with the cut on the unblocked track. With some futzing, one should be able to come up with a spring loaded version that is retractable. Functionally I see some potential challenges with this implementation though. First, it takes a lot of force to break the couplers. So the train has to be moving. This force will likely start pulling away at the clutch power of the coupler and eventually the coupler will pop off if it is not secured under the bogie plate. Also, it looks like you are catching the underside of the car rather than the truck. That works for the drop baseplate, but not for flat baseplates. Not to say these challenges are insurmountable, they just turn it into a fun problem.

Yep, that's why there is a male plug on the top of the PF cords. You'll also notice that each PF element has at most one female connection. Thus making it difficult (but not impossible) to connect two batteries together. If you do have a tight fit at the IR receiver, you can use an extension cable to move the stack of connectors to a more convenient location. I've run two XL motors off of one output, and separately I've run two train motors off of one output. Strangely, the pair of train motors will occasionally trip the receiver's over flow circuit but the XL's never have.

Say you have two IR receivers within range of your controller, everything set to the same channel. Turn the red knob on the controller, the red output on BOTH receivers will turn on. Turn the blue knob on your controller, the blue output on BOTH receivers will turn on. It gets a little tricky though if only one of the receivers "sees" the signal (so you can't count on coordination if you were trying to get two coupled locomotives to start together). Now as for your lights and your motor, it all depends how you plugged them in to the red and blue outputs. If you put light and motor on one loco on the red, then put light and motor on the other loco on blue, then one dial controls one loco, the other dial controls the other.

There have been numerous uncoupler designs. I cribbed good ideas from several of them when I built my trackside decoupler discussed in this thread. Mine is fairly quick (under 1 sec start to finish) but it hardly looks like anything you'd see trackside, takes precise positioning to get the train in the right spot (which can add to the fun), and you have to remember to retract the beam after pulling the locomotive away. Some folks have hidden the uncopler under a station platform or in a wayside building.

Heh heh heh, that's fantastic

The IR receiver has two outputs (red and blue) it sounds like you put the motor on one and the lights on the other. To turn on the lights, just twist the dial that corresponds to that output. Say that was the red output and the motor is on blue. Now you go out and buy a second train and you put the motor of new train on the red output (same channel as old train). Old train lights and new train motor will both respond to the red dial. In this case you can move the old train lights to the blue output (on top of the motor connection). Now the old train motor and lights will come on at the same time.

Oh, that would be cool

Wow, I never knew about that one. I suspect it was a cold war response to the M497 (which was an insane PR stunt in itself)

Very nice work

While stumbling through youtube, I tripped over this neat little video of homemade track out of plywood and thought it might be of interest to some on this forum (apologies if it has already been discussed)

Fantastic details (both in the model and in the movie) and a great build

Welcome aboard RN5 and PBP! Lego trains is a great hobby.

Looks like it has reappeared on the US S@H http://city.lego.com/en-us/trains/track-planner/

A very nice tutorial, thanks for collecting and sharing so much detail.

It wasn't a full article, just an aside on p51, summarizing this post on some other message board.

Oh, that has potential. First thought is to simply have two "teams", one at each yard trying to swamp the team at the other yard with incoming trains. The more operational thought is to incorporate some interchange into it, e.g., have a several different strings of cars and a smaller number of engines. The train that comes in has to stay at the destination for some amount of time. Meanwhile, the locos have to cut off, turn around, and pull out the next train back. Then have a yard switcher turn the train that came in. If that is too easy, require a certain amount of switching on either end, etc., etc.. I suspect you already do some of these ideas. Unfortunately NMRA is not in my cards this year, but maybe next year.

Dueling yards? Sounds interesting, any chance you could elaborate? Also, towards the end it looked like one individual was using a couple of controllers to switch a train around, did you have the mainline isolated in to separate blocks?

Well, when you start selling your Star Wars to pay for your train habit, then you'll know you're incurable (grin). To upgrade to the rechargeable battery in the US is $50 for the battery and $25 for the charger. Worth it if you are a power user, probably not if you are only a casual user. Until you know, a better starting point might be a pack of rechargeable AAA cells. If you are into building your own trains, you have a great opportunity to build, refine, rebuild, the red cargo train. There are a lot of small tinkering projects that you could do on that set for not much money (especially if you have a collection of bricks to work with).

You did a good job getting some tricky angles there.

The spiral is just something I stumbled on to, I believe it is from legoworld 2002, so if you did some searching you might find a video. I've seen it at least one other time, but I don't remember where.

I've never played with the 12v system, but it looks like it was the best engineered of all of the train systems (and certainly was the most developed system, with remote switches, working block signals, etc.). The motors were probably the most powerful of the train motors and with the rubber tires on grooved track, they had the best traction. The one drawback with the 12v system in my eyes is the fact that the power rails looks more like Lionel than it does real railroad (which doesn't seem to bother you and I don't think it would bother me much either, since none of the stock lego rail options look very realistic). In my opinion the two things that 9v has over 12v is the aesthetics of having only two rails, and the fact that the parts are 15 years newer and thus are more widely available. If the third party rail suppliers pan out, 9v could be very attractive. The two things I hate about PF is the fact that you do have to charge the batteries (or replace them) and the fact that you now have to hide 4x12x4 worth of power and controls somewhere on your train. It is pretty easy to hide the electronics in a carbody locomotive, but not so easily done in a small steam engine or a 4 wide hood of a freight diesel. I still like the "always ready" of 9v. It also becomes expensive to have more than one powered PF locomotive on a train. However, I've been able to power two PF train motors under one locomotive from one battery and IR receiver, and have found it to be more powerful than two 9v train motors (the recommended limit for a 9v system). With PF it is also nice to not have to worry about power drop around the 9v loop. The PF train is just as happy to run on any corner of the layout, the heavy 9v train slows when far from the power drop. PF is also happy running at slow speeds, 9v needs higher speeds to keep moving all the way around a loop. Step away from the PF train motors, instead use a pair of XL motors and as Tony once said, you can pull a Buick. It runs smooth and strong, powering two XL motors from a single battery. My one build in this style is definitely my most powerful locomotive and is comparable to at least 6x 9v motors (I pulled at least 51 heavy cars for 30 min). Note that you can fit all of the components on a 6x28 train baseplate. The engine was all for show, the actual power came entirely from the tender. If you can get away with having a large car on your trains, you could build several different unpowered, small, steam locomotives and push any one of them with your PF power car (thus reducing the number of batteries and IR receivers you need to run a respectable railroad). It is also nice that you can run multiple PF trains on one loop, but you do have to pay attention to prevent collisions (if you are comfortable with traditional model railroading, with PF you lose the ability to set up blocks or use DCC). You had mentioned an interest in shunting and realistic operations. That is going to be a challenge with all of the options. It is easy to pick up cars, but difficult to drop them. 12v had remote uncouplers, but they are quite pricy now, require the old style magnet holders (which are also quite pricy) and I've heard they did not work well (perhaps one of the folks lucky enough to have a lot of 12v could quickly dispel this last point). Since PF has two power outputs per receiver, it is a pretty good option for shunting, e.g., Selander's shunter and mine. Even then, all you can do is drop the entire train. To actually switch cars you still have to build trackside uncouplers if you don't want to reach into the layout, and even then you will still be limited in the level of realism you can achieve. If I were starting from scratch, I'd probably just do PF. Personally I have a large base of 9v, and so 9v will dominate my layout for some time, but that's the nice thing, you can mix different propulsion systems. In your case having 12v for the locomotives that you want to keep small and independent, and perhaps PF for the larger ones or those that can be coupled to power car.