A few years ago I bought a closeout little plastic Mustang at Wal Mart. It has a clear orange plastic body and a little solar panel on the back. If there is direct sunlight it will run once I put it in direct sunlight. It will also run when 6" or less from a lightbulb. I'm wondering if enough solar panels were mounted on a train, would it have enough power to move the train in a well lighted room?
Modeling the "Fargo Area Rapid Transit" in O scale 3 rail.
Yes.
Rob
Yes x 2
Yes x 3 ... with a suggestion: If you use a track powered train, you could use as large of a solar panel as you wanted, even big enough to charge a battery. The battery could then power a throttle, and you could run solar powered trains day or night. It would give more flexibility and better operation than solar cells mounted on the train itself, IMHO.
- James
You could sit by a window with a mirror and direct the sunlight to the panel on top of the train. Or, similarly, pass the sunlight through a frenel lense for mega wattage on it's way to your solar panels!
Becky
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
well basically not sure the cost involved completely but you buy a portable solar panel add a inverter and a car battery and you could run your transformer from that but I understand what your really trying to get at is mini solar panels and let that runt he train itself. yes if you could gauge it to a certain volts so your engine didn't go to fast.
Life's hard, even harder if your stupid John Wayne
http://rtssite.shutterfly.com/
According to Wikipedia, the average solar-panel output is 170 watts per square meter. So 10 feet of solar panels the full scale width of 2 2/3 inches will provide about 35 watts in sunlight, which should be enough to run a train.
Bob Nelson
Bob, I think the 170 watts/m^2 is for an illumination level of 1 kW/m^2. This is direct sunlight in the summer at noon in Florida. Something that probably isn't going to happen inside a house.
I personally wouldn't waste my money on these kinds of things. I would use the money to buy more trains.
Yeah, but wouldn't it be a cool way to run a garden railroad...?
Fifedog heres a pannel to get your garden railway going
45 watt system The solar panel kit comes with three 15 watt solar panels - simply connect the solar panels to your own 12 volt DC storage battery, and then use at least a 300 watt power inverter (sold separately) to power your 120 volt AC appliances anywhere.
The 45 watt rating is noon day, summer time, in Florida, with the solar panel pointed directly at the sun. Any other time (like at night, for example) the power output is less. Most of the time, much less.
If you really want to pursue this, there is data on the Internet that tells you what the solar radiation level v. time and season.
If you pursue this, you will discover how cheap electricity is when purchased from the power company.
I was just kidding as I figure the best that really is for maybe camping or something like that and then you would need to mount it on something so you could turn it as the sun did it's rotation but fifedog brought it so I figured I would supply the rest. I got that from harbor freights website and thought it would be kinda fitting for this topic but out on a limb at the same time. But on other hand you didn't have any outside receptacles near where you wanted a G scale occasional use layout this might work but I will pass for now lol
Actually, after just a little thought, I think the neatest way to power a garden railroad if there were no power handy would be to make a generator powered by a steam engine. Of course, if the boiler pressure were above 50 psi, you would need a full time certified engineer to run the steam engine, and you just might end up burning up all of the trees in the garden to fire the boiler, but this is just a detail.
If you are interested, look up Skinner engines and unaflow or uniflow engines. A good unaflow engine working under a reasonable load will operate at efficiencies as high as 24% which is very high for a steam engine. I don't think that 24% is achievable at 50 psi boiler pressure. You need something nearer 300 psi with superheat to do 24%.
Its winter,, I'm bored and anything hobby related is better to think about than other garbage easily found on the web. I will have to pop over to the Radio Shack website and price hobby solar panels. My idea is a can motored Lionel 4-4-2 with light post 70 light cars. Each car with its set of panels and wire up the panels in series and to "not" run the power through the track. I would guess the resistance and power loss would be less if just ran through wires directly to the DC engine. I would have to figure out the speed control,, maybe some type of RC setup.
Boyd, is this what you have in mind...?
I think the traction tire would fly off before it hits 88 mph.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.
Get the Classic Toy Trains newsletter delivered to your inbox twice a month