Construction

The Coastal Titan Railroad has taken several years to design, plan, and construct. Check back here to see the challenges and triumphs of the first rails laid on Baja Fibiger and the first railroad to deal with dinosaurs.

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Seeing the Light

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  One of my hopes for the garden railroad is to be able to build some of my own electronics for it. Whether some off-track movement or lights, or a piece of automation that helps manage the trains. It would be very useful to be able to control the automation from the DCC throttle. So there is my starting point: build an Arduino system that listens to DCC and does something with the signal.  After some searching on line I found several options and settled on the basic design from  Dave Bodnar at Train Electronics . One of the components needed is an optocoupler. I wasn't familiar with this so did some reading and turns out, this is a pretty ingenious little device. It provides a way to have signals pass from a high voltage part of a circuit (for me DCC running at about 15-18V) to a low voltage part (the Arduino at 3.3 or 5V) while having them electrically isolated. The incoming signal get converted to light (hence to opto-) which is picked up by a photodetector and sent ba...
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The Home Stretch of Construction

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This summer was particularly hot and busy at work so construction time was limited to small chunks here and there. But as fall approached I was able to give some focused time to the train and have been making good progress. A while ago I completed the initial sections so that I could  run the trains  a little. But trips were limited. The track didn't extend much beyond either switch and someone had to be at the controls all the time. Run time was about 20 seconds before the train had to stop and reverse. The train had to be short with only one or two cars besides the engine. Completed back segment That gave me plenty of incentive to complete more segments. I was able to add another segment in the back part that runs through the shrubs. And then in just a couple of days I was able to build the ladder railbed for four segments of the layout and was ready to install them in place. Due to the trouble we had getting pieces to line up (future post that's coming) my wife and I ...
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The Bells are a Ringin'

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From early on I've desired to have sounds coming from my engine to add to the joy of running it. While I wanted realistic sounding steam engine noises, for the first couple of years I had to satisfy myself with the occasional leaf getting caught between the wheels.  While it was pleasantly reminiscent of a baseball card in my bike spokes, I never really knew when it was going to start or end and it wasn't very prototypical. The Piko starter engine I have doesn't have a lot of room inside for add-ons. Looking around I learned that sound system, batteries, and other things too large to fit inside the engine are often held in converted box cars or the tender that comes with many smaller engines.  My engine has only a small little coal tank so I considered converting the starter kit box car, but I didn't really want to always have a box car on the tourist line. So I decided to buy my first rolling stock to convert and started searching for a tender on eBay. I found one that...
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