Starting The Car System

12/19/16

After over a year in design and construction, I have finally started my favorite and most important part of what will bring this module to life. The Car System. Based on the ideas and lessons I've learned from Faller and their car system, I have made some changes and hope I can improve the reliability and operation to what I'm looking for. 

The first step for me was to layout where all roads, direction of travels and lanes of traffic in the quadrant I was working on would be. I always use light pencil marks because it is often changing as this process continued. Using a 4' strait edge, various squares and radius tools are essential here to me because I am very particular about smooth operation of the vehicles. This is most crucial in the long straight sections because the vehicles will tend to wobble if the guide wire is not very strait. The corners can have slightly different radius just like prototypical roads, very rarely are two corners exactly the same.

Once I had all the layout for lanes of traffic, the next step was to cut the grooves for the magnet band to be installed. I am hoping that by keeping the grooves tight, I can save on touching up the road surface up and reduce cracking later. I used my dremel with a cutting/routing bit with a depth tuning attachment and radius tool. I found in the past modules that the less I cut free hand, the longer it takes, but the end result is worth it.

When all of the grooves are cut I started to lay the magnet band into the grooves to insure proper alignments and cut depths. I did not glue any of the band in at this point allowing for changes to be made. One note here; leaving 5cm or so gap cut at the end of the run of magnet band is a good practice if you plan to continue the road later on.

I made sure to test all of the routes with all of the different vehicles I had to make sure the corners are exceptable to the vehicles you plan to use and that the magnet band is installed with the correct polarity. Then the turn modules can be marked out.

This is a turn module I built using a piece of pipe, a servo and some pieces of metal. You can also see I have used painters tape over the tracks so the vehicles can pass while testing.

All of the main magnet guide band has been installed and locations marked out. I also started construction on the bus stop and a taxi stand.

Once all of the turn sections were installed and tested I used styrene to cover the access holes so I do not have deep fills to make with the road plaster material.

I decided to use styrene for the spots between the rails as well. I thought it offered much less messy installation and easier removal later over the plaster alternative.

In the space on the outside of the rails I experimented with Auto body filler (Bondo) to build up the gap because I've found in the past making large fills with plaster can start cracking when the modules are transported. 

Working on the Railroad

7/24/15
Last Updated: 1/28/16

After much wood working to get to this point, there's still a lot to do before the real "modeling" can begin. The lower deck railroad rails has only been a main focus because I cannot permanently mount the top deck until its ready. Once the top deck is installed the rails will be largely inaccessible. 

For this reason I decided to install wooden round stock as guard rails so if there is ever a problem with the trains, it would be much less likely they would fall to the floor. The rails also needed a base of ballast because I would be difficult to reach in later for scenery.

9/16/15

Once the lower deck rails were installed, I fixed in place the top deck. I drilled and soldered in the feeder wires for the rails before permanently fixing the top deck because access would be impossible in most spots.

After the deck was fastened I started drilling access holes and installing bus wires directly under the lower deck rails. Because of the complex automated control of the module using infrared and other voltage controls I decided against DCC Systems for now. I did however, install the wires (14awg) in a way that would allow one connection and I could run DCC equipment. 

This is the main controler (ArduinoUNO) with a relay shield. Because only one relay was needed for the fairly simple lower deck train controls, I desoldered the other three relays from the Arduino and they will operate in isolation.

10/15/15

After all of this infrastructure for the upper and lower deck rails were completed, next power supply had to be installed. Because I wanted the trains isolated from main power supply for voltage drop reasons I decided to just use a stand alone MRC 15V transformer. For main power I am using a PC 450 watt power supply.

10/21/15

After everything was connected to AC power in via a MRC1300 transformer and had some trouble I found the coil was faulty and it was replaced with an old Aurora 14v DC powerpack as a temporary solution to keeping the project moving forward.