wreck at the diamonds
- Thread starter E Mo Ry
- Start date
Hee hee!
As an adult, model train wrecks thrill me too. But, usually with my bottom of the line stuff.Non of the good stuff...On purpose anyway.
As an adult, model train wrecks thrill me too. But, usually with my bottom of the line stuff.Non of the good stuff...On purpose anyway.
Lmao. that's cute. Oh did I say cute? oop's! NA a couple cars and loco's aint' to bad. I don't think I've seen a "HO" scale wreck as bad as the one I had last year when we set up for Shriners Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana. The wreck was ungodly. 8 locomotives (SD-45-2's,AC4400-9's,SD-40's) on the lead was my pride and joy KCS #2001 AC4400 with more detailing than you could imagine was in the lead with over 170 cars pulling bout "notch 7-8" when a kid bumped the layout when he reached over the glass several module's in front of the train and he bumped it right as the train was crossing a rail joint and made the front axle on the lead truck flying off the track and every thing flu off down into a swamp ravine taking out phone poles trees cars trucks boats moss and everything in between where the glue was way over applied and took it all out in a big clump and cleared the land on its own. after a couple minutes of inspecting what happened, we realized the train was moving at about 75 scale MPH and about 15 pounds of moving freight behind the locomotives that the weight couldn't stop and just kept on pushing it, derailing all the cars in an accordion fashion the outside passenger ended up slamming dead into it coming from the other direction b4 we could reroute switch's or run for the throttle as the passenger had about 20 cars and 2 kato 6 axle F units (that don't stop on a dime!) and destroyed about $100.00 worth of equipment. over a few hours most of the cars were repaired and set back out on the line. a hand full of others including 4 of the locomotive's were trashed and beyond repair. (so i bought new shells) 2 cars disintegrated on impact b/c of the aged plastic but at least all the good expensive cars were towards the middle rear. NOTE: never put good cars at the very front or the very extreme back. if the train breaks and you don't know it well here it comes back around the layout to slam smooth into it. but make sure the weight is right for pulling long trains (heavy in the front light in the rear) I am fixing to start working on a prototype home made system that will help with this problem. the idea is, as long as the last car is moving while the track has power to it everything is fine but if the last car stops moving (i.e. mid train breaks) and power is still on to the track and loco's are moving then you will hear a steady beep on a 3" speaker just loud enough to catch your attention and let you know something is wrong. DCC users! I have not figured out how this will work on DCC systems yet b/c DCC has constant track power. I'll get back to you guys on that when I figure out a solution to the problem.
Charles
Charles
Ditto what Ralph said - the buildings in the background really give a sense of reality to the shot! Nice work!
Val
Val
hudsonelectric
Member
hudsonelectric
Member
Ya know what, i have 160 feet of mainline running and I still have inadvertent "meets" at the diamonds a lot more often than you'd think...looking into signalling systems that i can tie into my DCC and laptop to avoid these going forward...