the train-mounted camera

When people visit the layout in between op sessions, they always enjoy seeing the live view from the locomotive cab window. In the picture below, you can see the TV monitor to the right of the dispatcher's panel, displaying the view as the camera train makes its way through the Stacy St. yard in Seattle (directly in front of me as I reach over to fix something in the Burlington yard on the upper deck). You can also see the stairs and household plumbing along the wall, and the overhead fluorescent and track lighting. The grey industrial complex in the upper left is NW Olivine, a company on the Concrete Branch that supplies fine sand to locomotive facilities, among other customers. This makes for an unusual, although prototypical in this case, on-layout to on-layout shipper/receiver pair.

Back to the camera train - it is installed in an old Athearn F-unit (shown in the photo below) with power coming from the DCC voltage on the track. Look carefully and you can see the 4" flexible antenna sticking out from the cab. It transmits the video stream to a receiver in the center of the room, which then sends an old fashioned video signal across VCR type wires along the ceiling and down the side of the stairway to the TV monitor. To make room for the camera and power supply, I took the motor and drive gears out of the F-unit, so it has to be pushed by something else. Ideally we could have a sound decoder and speaker in it as well, hooked up to a headlight and consisted with the trailing units. Some day...

In theory, one could operate a train while sitting next to the dispatcher and reading hand signals from a brakeman walking next to the train as it moves around the layout (and using a ProtoThrottle for realistic locomotive control, of course). I think many people would find this fun. So far, the operating sessions have been so chaotic that nobody felt relaxed enough to try this, (or even the ProtoThrottle, for that matter) but the tools are in place, so someday it may happen.