I am reading Track Planning for Realistic Operation and the author has mentioned not once but twice flywheel equipped cars??? Is there such a thing???
Steve
If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough!
Moderators, I am sorry I didn't clarify but I am speaking about model railcars equipped with flywheels not actual prototype cars. That's why I posted this in general discussion.
John Armstrong did build a coupel of these and ran them on his layout. Keep in mind his own layout was O scale so there was quite a bit more space to fit the mechanism for this in the car. Main reason for this was to be able to 'kick' cars or a cut of cars into a siding, and also to catch the unsuspecting visiting operator as this generated a not insignificant amount of real physical momentum. There was more detailed information on the design of this car in an old MR article.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Cheers, the Bear.
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
Seems to me it only works if ALL your cars have flywheels. I doubt anyone has ever done that, so whether it would work (as in, be fun) is unknown.
One thing for sure: if you had a wreck, you would REALLY have a wreck.
Ed
It would probably work on a club type layout due to the man power required to equip all the rolling stock and tune it so that it has a realistic momentum factor also the gear ratio would have to be crazy because a steel wheel on a steel rail with such a small contact patch it would likely just cause the wheels to slide instead of roll. Plus disguising the system would be quite difficult.
7j43kOne thing for sure: if you had a wreck, you would REALLY have a wreck.
I agree the only fault is when you have a derailment it's not a one two car deal it's the entire train!
But with today's dcc systems I'd wager that a system could theoretically be devised to release the flywheel so in a derailment hit a button and the cars stop.
NWP SWP I am reading Track Planning for Realistic Operation and the author has mentioned not once but twice flywheel equipped cars??? Is there such a thing???
In the UK during the steam era, some terminus stations were built on an incline. When a loco arrived in the terminus station,the passengers disembarked and the loco pushed the carriages into a spur on the incline where the handbrakes would be applied. The loco would draw forward, then reverse alongside the carriages.
The guard would release the carriage brakes, the carriages would roll into the station, the loco would reverse on to the carriages , couple up and then depart.
A model railway club in the UK has modelled this operation in DCC by using a motor hidden in the carriage.
I guess if you wanted to model a cut of cars rolling under their own momentum into a spur, then equip one car with a motorised bogie with its own address for shunting and then consist it withe loco for normal operation.
I suspect most of the reasons for flywheel inertia in the consist were in essence solved ‘electrically’ with even the early versions of momentum throttles (which were just slow or ramped decay of the DC track voltage instead of proportional reduction following potentiometer position). It isn’t all that difficult to gin this sort of circuit up, make the overall effect adjustable with its own slider or pot (and incorporate the biggest of big hole emergency functions via a simple bypass switch, unless you had a coasting drive). And of course DCC makes it inherently possible to program inertia effects so closely mimicking ‘reality’ for a coupled consist ... with at least one major exception ... that there is little point in modeling realistic train-resistance characteristics any more than modeling the precise acceleration of a steam locomotive from its physics.
The exception is ‘scale’ slack and run-in effects, where it would be useful to replicate at least the practical effect of momentum (and then have speaker effect for the progressive sounds of the slack action, which I think is probably more significant in ‘enjoyment factor’ than simulating the relative motions)
As noted, if you want effective kicking action without seriously overweighting the cars, getting momentum via a rotating flywheel (perhaps with a digitally-addressable proportional brake for effective ‘trim’ or a separate small motor to spin it up instead of risking wheelslide) is an interesting idea... address it like a locomotive but under passive control relative to switches in the draft gear?
I suspect that one of the early effects of the Internet of Things era will be cheap addressability of even complex functions for many, many devices connected via little more than TCP/IP protocol as extended. That would greatly simplify programming and operation of even multiple long consists on club layouts...
There are people in the Electronics and DCC forum who know far more than I do about this, and hopefully they will post more either here or over there.
You can get some of this effect just by overweighting cars as long as they have good wheel sets. This used to be done by some back in the day but the wheelsets were not really up to the task back then, now on the straight I can kick a a car and it can go pretty far at times without extra weight, had to downgrade one cars wheels as it was just too freewheeling.