Max,
would it be possible to add sound?
Like adding a decoder in the passenger car?
I noticed the motor seems to have a slight whine to it. Of course, I don't know if that's because it really does, or if it's really pretty quiet and I just have my sound turned too high.
This is such a great project.
I'm so amazed.
There's a good bit of whine. You're not imagining it. That's a necessity of life when you have a super high speed pager motor going through a 400:1 DOUBLE WORM gear reduction to get the torque necessary to move an engine. There's just a lot of fast-spinning gears in there, so there's going to be some noise. It tops out at about 12 mph. With 40" tender wheels, that's 100.8 RPM. 100.8 x 400 = 40,336. So that little motor is doing 40,336 RPM when I run the engine at full speed (which is most of the time in that video).
As for sound, HA! I suppose if I added a battery to the closed coach, I could rig up some sort of sound. No way would I put wheel pickups on the coaches. The engine could never tolerate the drag. I briefly thought of adding tiny SMD LEDs in the coach run off a little battery to look like oil lanterns hung on the ends of the seats (which the Rocket "1st Class" coach actually did have). But no, I think I'm done with this one.
