Boom Times Ahead

Back when I was a kid, I used to play a railroad simulation game called Transport Tycoon. Besides lots of trains, tons of track laying and days from my life spent, this game also incorporated a sort of basic economy, and when things got better, you had this newspaper headline appearing - Boom Times Ahead.

Somewhere in October last year, the layout was basically in the same form as the preceding post. The track was all layed out, with some grey ballast made from sawdust, that I coloured myself. A better closeup can be seen in the left photo, took in april this year, when the tunnel ceiling was removed. At the time, I just wanted to get the layout up and running. All I needed was a way to computer-control the trains, and, hopefully, the rest will come along. In 2008, I stumbled upon a company called Phidgets, that produced some interesting electronics. They made very small boards, that could be connected to the USB port of the computer, and control small DC motors, command relays or read in values from various sensors. The board controlling the DC motors could be used for the computer-controlling part, the relay boards were perfect for throwing switches around the layout, also from the computer, while the sensors and corresponding boards could send values about track occupancy. I also discovered Viessmann, that produced some fine signals, with prototypical slow change of the lights, and semaphore signals that had slow moving arms, just like the real thing. So i made a small estimation of how much money would need to go in a few boards and a couple of signals for experimenting...and then decided to give up for a while, because if was too much at the time. Fortunately, in october 2009 I could get a little monthly budget dedicated exclusely to railroading, so things started looking up. I ordered 2 Phidgets 1060, that allowed me to control 2 DC motors each - this meant being able to control 4 locomotives at this time, one Phidget 1017, that could throw the PIKO switches on the layout, and one Phidget 1018 with 3 IR sensors, which I intended to use for track occupancy detection. Also one semaphore signal (4500) and a light signal (4013), one AC transformer (5200) and a couple other accesories from Viessmann found their way to my layout.

Once the order arrived, tests soon started. On the left the Phidget 1017 was being set-up for some tests with the light signal from Viessmann. The 1017 proved to be a success - it had 8 relay outputs - and a switch needed 1 relay to control it, the semaphore signal also 1 relay, while the light signal took 3 relays for displaying all its 4 color aspects. The 1018 and the IR detectors looked promising - at least the hand and some sheet of paper could be detected. The Phidget 1060 was also looking good. The 1.5 amp limit meant that virtually any locomotive could be operated. It also supported acceleration, so coding would be less complicated in the future. And the first tests with a small PIKO steam locomotive made me think that more 1060 boards would soon be needed.

Unfortunately further tests will reveal critical problems...