DIY's working on the railroad Dec 5 2006 ?

[Milwhiawatha]

I recorded DIY's Working on the railroad (sick of getting up early to see it every Tuesday) Anyhow I watched it before I came downstairs for breakfast and was sorta disappointed they focused around O scale for animation. Now dont get me wrog O is nice easy to handle scale but when it comes to animation I feel a little left out. Ontop of it they only showed already built animations no kits or how tos, so how does this help me work on my railroad if they just show out of box items? It doesn't.

But there was one thing that showed that I liked it was an infered detection unit built into a signal box to control cossing gates. I am curious is this available in HO? or is infered detectors available for us? And do we only need one to make the crossing gates work?

 

Thanks in Advance.

[jecorbett]

My LHS has a display HO railroad and it has two of those detection units. There are two detectors, one on each side of the crossing to register when a train is approaching and when it has passed. They look like that would be fairly easy to install. My problem is I have a double track mainline and I am not sure how it would handle the situation where you have trains approaching the crossing from opposite directions. Would it get confused?