I have been building a series of T Gauge experimental layouts powered using a linear motor track system instead of conventional propulsion, my own personal variant of a system from IDL Motors (teenytrains.com). Outer Melbourne is the second of these, a 1:450 scale, 48"x17" model of a fictitious station on the outer edge of the Melbourne (Australia) suburban network around 1980, running the trains I grew up with. There is a brief video of this layout in the Electronics/Animation section, but the full description is here.
The rail side of the layout is a simple single-track oval, with the half hidden behind the backscene providing staging for examples of the three types of electric multiple unit trains of the period as well as a single-car parcels coach. The automation pulls one train out at a time, stops it at the station, then continues back into the storage road. The operating pattern is three trains clockwise followed by two anti-clockwise, so all the trains gradually cycle through in both directions to get the maximum variety from such a limited track plan.
The road side of the layout is a two-lane twisted oval, also half hidden behind behind the backscene, with a steady flow of vehicles in each direction interrupted by a random delay to make things less predicatble. The main feature of interest is a working level crossing, complete with gates, lights and bells, with the road traffic stopping to give way to the trains. This was my first attempt at such a feature, and the queuing at the crossing has a number of annoying limitations with overly-wide gaps between stopped vehicles and the vehicles sometimes not quite stopping. I have made some improvements to this since the video was taken, and have revised the track system to completely solve the problem, but retrofitting it to this layout would require a complete rebuild and I prefer to direct the effort towards new layouts.
The trains, buildings and buses are 3D printed on a FlashForge FDM printer, and finished with my first attempts at home-made decals. The track and road surfaces are self-adhesive label paper printed on an inkjet with suitable artwork generated by a custom Windows program.
The control electronics are an improvement on the previous layout, still done by hand on Veroboard but with a semi-modular design. There are three identical controllers (one for rail, two for road), each with a custom plug-in accessory board handling the track switching. An additional custom board handles the level crossing gates, lights and bells. The whole thing runs off two 15V 2A power supplies.
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