Hi all,
I have been lurking here for a couple of years now, thought it was about time to say hello and share a bit of background on my model railway experience.
I'm a Mechanical Engineer by trade and have always had an interest in electronics.
I started on OO when I was still in single digits and steadily built up (by means of xmas and b'day presents) a 'standard Hornby' layout on a board in the spare room. Still like OO and have recently started to have a go with DCC and JMRI, no layout as yet, but the workbench is perfect for a temporary shunting yard.
One of my good buddies is also into model railway and was bought a LGB starter set when he was young. His old man always wanted to build a garden railway together, Unfortuently he passed before they got to do that.
Summer 2019, my friend decided to put some track down in his garden on the grass with the little bit of track he owned. We had that DC layout down for a week or so.
I really enjoyed it, and that's where it started. I fully blame him for my now love of LGB (he is okay with that).
Early 2020, he decided he wanted to build something that was going to last a bit longer, maybe a few months. He bought some more track to make it happen. My thinking was if that was the case, then we needed a way of controlling the points and being able to drive more than one Loco on a single road without using DCC (at the time, with the little I understood about DCC, it looked incredibly expensive and possibly unreliable outside). Here starts the real journey.
With the UK now in lockdown I decided that I needed a loco to prototype on and some track to test with. I found myself a cheap LGB 2080D that needed some work and some cheap ish second hand track.
Working around the lockdowns we managed to plan and build the layout in his garden, and have a few good weekends running.
There is a video from the 2020 layout here:
The first temporary layout was a great success. We learnt a lot, including that grass is bad for track power.
I hacked a 6CH RC radio set to have 14CH (FS-i6) and we controlled 3D printed servo point motors
directly from that. Setting end points was a painful process, and we had some issues with the length of the wires, but generally it worked okay.
The locos were controlled with the same brand of radio, again hacked to give more channels, and fitted with Arduinos on protoboard to decode and interface with
motor controllers, Mylocosound cards, smoke units and lighting. In total, I converted 4 locos to trackpower/RC.
With the lockdowns continuing, we both had spare time on our hands, and this lead to planning the 2021 layout and stock. We were both properly hooked on it now, and this lead to me buying another loco, an LGB 2040, which I kitted out with the next iteration of my loco controller - enabling homebrew servo pantographs, servo couplers, PWM light control and sound via Mylocosound. I also designed and 3D printed a copy of the LGB low loader.
I upgraded the control system massively, building loads of custom control PCB's, a differential I2C network, servo controlled semaphore signals and LED light signals.
There is a fairly long explanation video on that system:
My buddy did the videos from last years layout, you can find them here:
Which brings us to 2022. I bought myself another 2 Locos, a 23900 with LGB remote couplers and a 21151 which needs some TLC, and have designed and prototyped my own radio controller which
can drive both DC motor board locos and DCC decoder Locos, from either track or battery power.
I have recently picked up a load of overtime and bought myself enough track to build a permanent way in my garden. I've already made a good start on that, I am aiming to post some updates on that here, including info / updates on my projects.
Reading this forum has provided me with lots of help and ideas so far - I would like to pass on my thanks and hope to give some back (if I can).
The G Scale playlist on my Youtube details most of my adventures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQHBg8nLPer7VFqi9FgTIq1Om84hMreQj.
TLDR - I recently got into G scale and it's great.
I have been lurking here for a couple of years now, thought it was about time to say hello and share a bit of background on my model railway experience.
I'm a Mechanical Engineer by trade and have always had an interest in electronics.
I started on OO when I was still in single digits and steadily built up (by means of xmas and b'day presents) a 'standard Hornby' layout on a board in the spare room. Still like OO and have recently started to have a go with DCC and JMRI, no layout as yet, but the workbench is perfect for a temporary shunting yard.
One of my good buddies is also into model railway and was bought a LGB starter set when he was young. His old man always wanted to build a garden railway together, Unfortuently he passed before they got to do that.
Summer 2019, my friend decided to put some track down in his garden on the grass with the little bit of track he owned. We had that DC layout down for a week or so.
I really enjoyed it, and that's where it started. I fully blame him for my now love of LGB (he is okay with that).
Early 2020, he decided he wanted to build something that was going to last a bit longer, maybe a few months. He bought some more track to make it happen. My thinking was if that was the case, then we needed a way of controlling the points and being able to drive more than one Loco on a single road without using DCC (at the time, with the little I understood about DCC, it looked incredibly expensive and possibly unreliable outside). Here starts the real journey.
With the UK now in lockdown I decided that I needed a loco to prototype on and some track to test with. I found myself a cheap LGB 2080D that needed some work and some cheap ish second hand track.
Working around the lockdowns we managed to plan and build the layout in his garden, and have a few good weekends running.
There is a video from the 2020 layout here:
The first temporary layout was a great success. We learnt a lot, including that grass is bad for track power.
I hacked a 6CH RC radio set to have 14CH (FS-i6) and we controlled 3D printed servo point motors
directly from that. Setting end points was a painful process, and we had some issues with the length of the wires, but generally it worked okay.
The locos were controlled with the same brand of radio, again hacked to give more channels, and fitted with Arduinos on protoboard to decode and interface with
motor controllers, Mylocosound cards, smoke units and lighting. In total, I converted 4 locos to trackpower/RC.
With the lockdowns continuing, we both had spare time on our hands, and this lead to planning the 2021 layout and stock. We were both properly hooked on it now, and this lead to me buying another loco, an LGB 2040, which I kitted out with the next iteration of my loco controller - enabling homebrew servo pantographs, servo couplers, PWM light control and sound via Mylocosound. I also designed and 3D printed a copy of the LGB low loader.
I upgraded the control system massively, building loads of custom control PCB's, a differential I2C network, servo controlled semaphore signals and LED light signals.
There is a fairly long explanation video on that system:
My buddy did the videos from last years layout, you can find them here:
Which brings us to 2022. I bought myself another 2 Locos, a 23900 with LGB remote couplers and a 21151 which needs some TLC, and have designed and prototyped my own radio controller which
can drive both DC motor board locos and DCC decoder Locos, from either track or battery power.
I have recently picked up a load of overtime and bought myself enough track to build a permanent way in my garden. I've already made a good start on that, I am aiming to post some updates on that here, including info / updates on my projects.
Reading this forum has provided me with lots of help and ideas so far - I would like to pass on my thanks and hope to give some back (if I can).
The G Scale playlist on my Youtube details most of my adventures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQHBg8nLPer7VFqi9FgTIq1Om84hMreQj.
TLDR - I recently got into G scale and it's great.
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- I'm happy to break this topic out into its own thread and expand on the workings of.
