If you can read this... thank a teacher. If you are reading this in english... thank a veteran
When in doubt. grab a hammer.
If it moves and isn't supposed to, get a hammer
If it doesn't move and is supposed to, get a hammer
If it's broken, get a hammer
If it can't be fixed with a hammer... DUCK TAPE!
Zip-zaps are a lot larger than HO scale cars, If I rember, they are larger than hotwheels or matchbox cars. On top of that they would probably make a hustler seem slow (I was never able to get mine to go slow)
You might be able to pull something combining one of them with a life-like HO slot car. But it'd still be ungodly fast...
Vincent
Wants: 1. high-quality, sound equipped, SD40-2s, C636s, C30-7s, and F-units in BN. As for ones that don't cost an arm and a leg, that's out of the question....
2. An end to the limited-production and other crap that makes models harder to get and more expensive.
This sounds way better than the slot car track I was going to run on my layout. It's been a couple years since I saw a zipzap but yes IIRC they were pretty close to HO if not smaller.
As for a model project, hmm I think I would get one of those variety pack HO car sets that were/are availible, you know the ones with gaudy bright colors and no floor or interior just a shell. Theyre cheap and had some different wheelbases so you could try to match the zipzap chassis. Heck ask some neighborhood kids if they have some broken zipzaps you could try this on (I'm sure SOMEONE has stepped on those little buggers). If the chassis is broken how hard is it to build from scratch or modify the wheelbase?
If things play nicely so far then go for the gusto with a new zipzap and the nicely detailed body of choice.
I think I'm still going to do slot cars for sentimental reasons but this is an exciting option.
Modeling the Cleveland and Pittsburgh during the PennCentral era starting on the Cleveland lakefront and ending in Mingo junction
I think that it would be a more viable idea to contact the people at GT-command in Denmark.
They have already developed a "GPS" system for model railroads, making cars move around the citys guided via the GPS wouldn´t be so difficult I think.
Any takers?
Swedish Custom painter and model maker. My Website:
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Using the GPS would probably work too but then it would be almost as limited as the Faller system unless one reprogrammed the path for each operating session. Good for automation but I think the OP is trying to get away from that.
How about this for play value: train delivers boxcar of LCL to freight house. 20 minutes later a REA delivery truck is loaded and begins to make it's rounds through the city. At this point one is still delivering the goods called out on the waybill. The delivery truck would only need to go to the places that are waiting on goods leaving the option open to get to those destinations as the driver sees fit.
This could be something to keep operators occupied while waiting for the next departure of their train. Make em work for FedEx.
While all this might be fun, I find it to be a distraction. The biggest drawback to having operating vehicles is they require full streets to operate on. To me, streets are a scenery element, part of the stage set, in other words, and need to be able to disappear behind buildings, clumps of trees, or around bends.
What's next? A staging yard for your cars? Car cards and waybills that determine whether the brown station wagon should go to the grocery store or the elementary school? The only earthly purpose to having a Faller Car system or something similar is to provide a more realistic back ground when you make a video of your trains. It would be cool to have a truck pacing along as part of the scene, and eliminate the distraction of a car just sitting there on the bridge while the train is moving.
But that can be accomplished with a simple loop system that gets employed only when the cameras are rolling. Otherwise it seems to be a logistical nightmare.
Lee
Route of the Alpha Jets www.wmrywesternlines.net
I would rather have something like this on my layout:
Link
wm3798 While all this might be fun, I find it to be a distraction. The biggest drawback to having operating vehicles is they require full streets to operate on. To me, streets are a scenery element, part of the stage set, in other words, and need to be able to disappear behind buildings, clumps of trees, or around bends. What's next? A staging yard for your cars? Car cards and waybills that determine whether the brown station wagon should go to the grocery store or the elementary school? The only earthly purpose to having a Faller Car system or something similar is to provide a more realistic back ground when you make a video of your trains. It would be cool to have a truck pacing along as part of the scene, and eliminate the distraction of a car just sitting there on the bridge while the train is moving. Lee
What the Faller really works for is showing off the layout. Train Shows and Open Houses. I think, the way to do it, if your layout is folded over itself, is to connect the main roads and run a car the entire layout around. But your right, too many and you lose track of the trains, and it becomes an unwieldy expense.
What I think would be fun, would be to hook up the Faller to a Street Running. But there's no easy way to do that.
I had the Zip-Zap thought a few years ago as well. Here's the problems: 1, they are HUGE compared to HO scale. Even larger than the Hot Wheel's semis, which are actually close to 1:87. (Though semis we have plenty of, figures...) I thought about ooking a Zip Zap up to connected streets on a layout for another kid thing to do while Daddy's running the train. It could also beome a lesson for Operation Lifesaver. But they are drastically out of scale. And the other issue is that you have to protect your scenery for wayward drivers. Streetsigns and fenceposts especially, as well as wooden bridge railings.
-Morgan
PackerYou might be able to pull something combining one of them with a life-like HO slot car. But it'd still be ungodly fast...
Yeah well, it would give all those doughnut-lovin HO-scale cops something to be doing for a change...
John
Things like what the O/P is proposing is one of the pitfalls of working in HO scale, I spoke to a S scale club member at a train show where they were displaying their excellent modular layout. He told me one of the things they were working on was remote control vehicles. A very easy thing to do seeing as the availability of 1/64 vehicles is almost endless and there are a ton of R/C cars in that scale as well so with a little kit bashing you could have any vehicle you want operating on your layout wih tout the ugly slot in the pavement or running around in circles
Sorry it's in German, but just what you asked for!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUMZq4Sgo_0
WM3798, car cards and waybills for the r/c cars, sure why not? Brown station wagon (Mrs. Brady?) need to get groceries, stops for gas, then proceed to school to pick up kids, then deliver groceries and kids to house. Looks like a 4 cycle waybill...
Really if you want to use that argument for operating vehicles on a layout it can be turned around on your trains as well. Remember unless you operate 1:1 scale you're not really delivering anything so throw away those useless toys
While it's true that the trains are the stars on a model railroad one has to keep in mind that in the real world there is probably 1000 miles of road for every mile of track so roads are sorely underepresented on layouts. It just adds a challenge to planning a layout but the payoff can be fun. It doesn't have to be a distraction and as pointed out it could even be made part of an operating session. Still it is a real life distraction/challenge for the prototype. If it's not your cup of tea thats fine.
jwhitten, I know you were being tounge in cheek but thats something that could be fun to model nd more entertaining than the premade scenes that you can buy. Sherrif Coaltrane sets up his speed trap...
Guardrails that can contain a careening vehicle... I don't think that would be too hard. Balsa and white glue may not do it but styrene and CA should.
ruderunnerUsing the GPS would probably work too
If you're referring to "real" GPS then I can state categorically it would *not* work unless you don't mind your cars wandering back and forth over 30+ (real 1:1) feet or so around a real "data point", which is about the minimum resolution (accuracy) of regular off-the-shelf commercially (publicly) available GPS systems. The actual accuracy would likely be worse than that even, up to two or three times worse, would be my personal estimate. And that would be assuming you had no issues with satellite reception, which is usually very difficult to nigh-on impossible indoors, and just plain forget it happening in a basement. Then, each vehicle would have to have the GPS system onboard, adding to the cost, complexity and power consumption of the vehicle, and also the level of miniaturization required to shoe-horn everything in there, plus the motor and the battery and the drive / control electronics. Probably not impossible to do that part, but at the least it would be expensive. Probably also the battery life would be terrible.
Just spit-ballin' here-- there are a couple of ways something like that *might* be possible, beyond the simplistic method that Faller uses for their system...
Probably in every potentially viable system (at least of a 2010-ish vintage) it would be necessary to have external computing power to assist with the recognition, route-planning, dispatch, and operation of the system. That in-turn would likely imply some sort of on-board receiving system, or perhaps a tranceiving system to, at least, receive commands from the external computer, or at best, be a two-way system in order to send responses back.
You might be able to start using the "embedded wire" concept, like Faller, and then augment it with something else. Cameras perhaps, using infrared light to illuminate the area and video cameras to view the road surface. Each car could be marked with a paint that could only be seen under infrared. The computer could then use the video imaging as feedback to help locate and operate the vehicles.
There are problems with this idea. A number of them in fact. The typical resolution of video isn't good enough to distinguish the cars reliably (or at all) at a distance. From a distance of 3-5 feet even, the cars are going to only be a few "pixels" worth of information in the video stream. High resolution video cameras are available but you'd have to use extremely high-res versions which are very expensive.
Also you would almost certainly need more than one camera-- probably many cameras-- even for relatively small layouts, which would add to the expense, and to the overhead of sampling and managing the data streams.
Which, btw, would be the next problem. Figuring out which "pixels" are moving-- including figuring out which ones are *supposed* to be moving-- their direction, heading, velocity, etc. Not impossible, but just more processing overhead required to handle it.
Then there is the route management. This could actually turn out to be a little easier than first imagined due to the fact that you have all the time in the world to measure and enter the exact "world space" of the layout, including where the roads are. Knowing this would greatly diminish the difficulty of the problem and provide a well-known set of boundaries for the car detection and routing system.
Figuring out which car is which is a harder problem though-- but perhaps cars could be tagged with RFID tags. That would imply RFID readers strategically located around the layout-- wherever the roads are anyway. That would have a side-benefit of assisting any camera arrangement in detecting / locating vehicles. A technique known as "sensor-fusion", but that particular combination and this application, would be pushing the concept to its limits-- at least in terms of affordability.
One thing I've always been curious about though in the Faller system-- why are they simply using a steel wire and magnets? Why not put a small current through the wire and sense that instead? Probably almost the exact same magnetic sensing mechanism (probably "Hall Effect" sensors) in the vehicle would have worked. However, I'm guessing their engineers would have thought of that and tried it out, but I'd be interested to know why they decided against it? Is there some technical reason why not? Or was it simply a marketing and ease of setup / use decision? I guess it could also be a power phase mgmt issue-- not wanting to deal with crossed wires or return loops and such.
However, if you were able to use a current sense line for the route preparation, then it might be possible to encode some potentially useful information into the current sent down the line-- perhaps a time code, for instance. That would permit a type of "poor man's" GPS (really probably more like "Time-Domain Reflectometry", without the reflectometry part) that would enable a vehicle to locate itself along a particular sensing line "branch". If it had some sort of on-board tranceiving capability, then that information could be relayed to the dispatch / routing system, which would have an internal map of the overall road system, as delineated by the current sense lines, so as to be able to reasonably determine the position of the vehicle. Also direction and speed could also be obtained that way.
In fact, thinking it over, that might make it possible to eliminate the cameras and stuff altogether, and just use current sense lines as the principle locating mechanism.
Theoretically it could be possible to also provide power to the vehicles traveling along the sense lines via the sense lines themselves. The technology to do that is known but as far as I know, the ability to shrink it to a useful scale (i.e. HO or N, for instance) is not yet available. Also there would be a "heat" component to that method that would also have to be dealt with. (And there is probably also a heat factor anyway that needs to be considered even in the currently-available Faller system).
Adding some "un-predictability" though wouldn't be all that hard I don't think. Once you've surmounted these previous issues-- if you can get it to work-- the rest is probably not that difficult. I think you'd probably have some onboard CPU horsepower, in all likelihood in such an arrangement as we've contemplated above, so whatever extra leftover cycles could probably be borrowed to add some variability in the vehicle's operation. Also the main dispatch / routing computer could assist with that too. The onboard CPU handling localized variations (i.e. +/- maybe 1/8th inch or so side-to-side, or speed, for example) and the main computer handling general route randomization.
ruderunnerjwhitten, I know you were being tounge in cheek but thats something that could be fun to model nd more entertaining than the premade scenes that you can buy. Sherrif Coaltrane sets up his speed trap...
Finally a use for all those "City-scenes" Billboards that Walthers/Life-like keeps trying to give away...
(You can also get your squad cars and tow-truck there too... )
RC truck
And regarding the GPS, if you saw the link I had above it isn´t a "real" GPS. The "satellites" in this case is in the roof of the room.
By the way, the resolution of real GPS is much better than 30 feet, I have a friend who uses GPS control in RC airplanes, and they land on the strip +/- 4 feet all the time. It was many years ago that the resolution was upgraded to military specs, maybe in the US there is still some issiues of low resolution to avoid amateur guidance systems?
Graffen +/- 4 feet
I'm sure it has a lot to do with wweather, but 4 feet is the width of a common layout, or less if on a shelf. So I still say rule GPS out.
Teen Steam: A Zip-Zap motor will likely fit in an HO semi with a little prodding. If you can gear the axles for HO scale wheels, you'd be good. But, I'm not sure how strong it would be pulling a steamer around. You, your buddy, or both could probably figure out how to cut and smash it all in.
One other thought, if you can get the Zip inside, you may need to redo the axles too, in case the HO ones are just the thin metal pins. Which basically means more time with Mr. HO wheel, Mr. thick metal tube, and Mr. Smashy. :D
Next someone will be stuffing a sound decoder into that R/C dozer or the cars or trucks, then someone will complain that the sound isn't prototypical.
Allegheny2-6-6-6 Next someone will be stuffing a sound decoder into that R/C dozer or the cars or trucks, then someone will complain that the sound isn't prototypical.
Aftermarket exhaust or engine swaps...
Hmmmm, German guys building U-boats! Also, looks like average age is pretty young, so lots steadier hands and better eyes than I, Gunga Din! My Garmin is good to about two meters, but you're right, wouldn't work in the basement. Gerry S.