the Solar Powered railway


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It all began with the rats. For you see, I live in a co-op, which is a large house shared by lots (in this case, 60) people. Things aren't quite the cleanest, and the rats had gotten into our pantry. One of my housemates was wondering out loud, perhaps, if we ran a train set in the pantry at night it would scare the rats away. :D

I recalled I had an old HO train set stored away, and I thought, well, even if we can't scare off the rats, it'd still be fun to run some trains around the house. Unfortunately, the train set being a relic from the 80's or so, even after giving the track a good scrubbin, the engine was still coming to a halt every few inches it ran over a spot of bad track. Now one might think, this is where one gets some track cleaning fluid... but me being sort of a hippie, I wasn't going to use anything stronger than vinegar on my railroad, and if that didn't work, it'd be time to get a little creative!

It didn't take too long for it to turn into a little renewable energy project, after all, this might be a fun way to learn a few technical skills in this emerging industry. I bought a few solar mini solar panels, wired them up in series, and presto, the solar powered railway. Never need to clean track again!

A few of the details:
The engine is an AHM diesel. The motor runs on 300 milliamps and a minimum of 4 volts.
The solar panels are each 1 volt, 400 milliamps. 4 of them are enough to get the wheels turning, 6 will get the engine up slight grades. All said and done, they perform nicely in the sun (who would have thought one could get a tan while working on one's model railroad?) but have this unfortunate tendency to bring service to a halt whenever the line passes beneath a shadow. :( I'll have to add a second array in parallel to the first to deal with that.

more to come...
 
So how are you going to get a solar powered train to work in a rat infested pantry? Tear off the roof? Rat traps are a whole lot cheaper! :)
 
haha, we dismissed the idea of using it scare rats pretty early on, in favor of the radical idea of not leaving food out.
 
I love the term "Renewable Energy" There is no such thing. You can convert it but you can't renew it. You can also store it (batteries, fuel)
The most economic method at this point is the internal combustion engine and of course nuclear. They're also the cleanest but the environmental types can't see past the propaganda to realize it.
 
I agree with you on the nuclear, unfortunately a mini-reactor would be just a bit hard to get working right.
 
hmmm, surprised that it has enough power.
but why not just clean the rails or get new rails altogether? then you could have stationary solar power plant if you want to go solar. or if you have to have them panels rolling it could be interesting to modify the cars to feed the power back into rails and avoid this wire clutter.

that said i'm planning a solar power plant on my layout - have bunch of old garden lights laying around that will be cannibalized for their panels. non functional of source since it is indoors.
 
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I figured out how much power the motor needed by running on DC and gradually turning up the power until the engine started, and measuring the voltage with a multimeter. The engine had come with a instruction sheet that specified the number of amps need (0.300). The panels were from Solar-World.com for five bucks apiece. They come pre-wired in nice little modules.

Now that I got the basic mechanics working I'm looking to hide the wires. The idea of the cars feeding the power back into the rails sounds interesting. Just bought a bunch of fairly beat-up old metal passenger cars, and am planning to cobble together a solar multiple-unit.
 
Why not do it the way it was done before house mains power were common? Use your solar panels to feed a battery bank and then use a transformer to provide 12 volt power to the power pack. At one time, all the big Lionel layouts were run by some honkin' big batteries. I'm sure you could find some cheap sealed lead acid batteries to use as your storage bank.
 
smiley said:
The panels were from Solar-World.com for five bucks apiece. They come pre-wired in nice little modules
Click to expand...
that is actually quite useful info.

fun experiment? perhaps, but i think it is already well established that solar panel will produce power when under sunlight and motor will produce work when powered.

but generally i don't see a lot of sense in this as model RR. how will you go about controlling the loco? do you want to prove that old dirty rails are useful without proper cleaning (i just don't understand why is it that you refuse to clean them...)? what is your main goal here?
 
Controlling speed is pretty easy - simply wave hand over panels to slow down / stop. ;) The tracks are going to be set up outside in the garden, where regular cleaning would be difficult. The main reason for going solar though is the hippie theme the layout will have, this being Berkeley after all. Think psychedelic rainbow colored passenger cars.

That battery idea does get me thinking of other unconventional ways to move the trains, such as a cable system, though I wouldn't know how to make that work around curves.
 
well, he is an artis and a hippie so good looking avatar is a given :D

somehow i missed the mini nuclear reactor comment. but i can already see the hobby of the future: scale nuclear reactor models, live! mini reactors, mini turbines, mini fuel rods, gorgeous mini nuclear meltdowns in your garage... lovely! :laughs:

EDIT:
as far as cable propelled trains besides all kind of funiculars it is done in Zurich international airport - skymetro people mover. BTW the ride was so smooooth fast and quiet its unbelievable.

here is the how cables arranged under curved tracks:

800px-Cape_Point_Passing_Track_.JPG


accomplishing this in HO or whatever scale will be super challenging i can imagine. most of this stuff must be custom fabbed.
if you all set to use those panels and don't want to clean tracks your only option is modify the couplings to pass power, ala Marklin power couplings.

i still however don't quite understand your reasons for doing this...
 
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I like the idea of a solar powered model railroad. I just wonder how you could go about hooking up a conventional power pack to solar batteries so that after the batteries have been outside charging all day you could use the stored up energy to run your indoor trains.
 
You'd have a battery bank and an inverter. The inverter would convert the stored 12-24 volts DC to 120 volts AC. The battereies themselves are not solar, it's the solar panels that have to charge the bateries through a solar charge monitoring system . Golf cart batteries are usually hooked up in series to give you enough amps. I've got this set-up in my motor home and it's not cheap. If I was to start from scratch with the solar panels, charging monitoring system, a 2000 watt inverter, and a battery bank, it would easily be in the $3,000-$4,000 range.
 
shadow solution

You mentioned that the train slows or stops when the solar array is out of the direct sunlight. Perhaps some big electrolytic capacitors hidden inside a passenger car (or tank car, if you do a freight train) would get you through those mini-eclipses.
 
I've seen some pretty silly stuff done to model railroading before, but I gotta say, this takes the cake. Waving your hand over the collectors as a means of regulating speed? Now that's just plain funny.
 
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