I have been working on a bench and then a temporary layout for my Schuco Monorails for a while that I wanted to share. In this layout I have 6 monorails that are in play. Four of the monorails run on the same loop with an relay circuit with magnetic reed switches block switching circuit to prevent them from running into each other. The other two monorails are in a "dueling/tag-team" loop where they each go in opposite directions and then activate a Schuco switch that controls a pair of track switches that activates the other train.

There is a lot of work left to do and this is just temporary. You will see wires on top of the tabletop that will come from underneath in the final layout. The plan is to have Main Street in the front of the layout with a Matterhorn for the monorails to go around and then take liberties with the rest of Disneyland (there are a few buildings and cutouts in place in the video).

Below is a link to about an 8-minute youtube video up to 720P in resolution that looks at the trains running from several angles. It starts with looks from the MSS end and then has clips from some other views.

KarlG


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sFPsPhTXSs

Very cool!!! Most Schuco I've ever seen!!

very nice Karl, I know your little excursion train has Iron horse cars but who did the locomotive?
I still marvel at your bashed station. I presume the castle and haunted mansion are the paper model you tout. All those Schucos working so well make me think you are a snake charmer.

Thanks jazzfan4.

Main Street Station was at the start of it all. I built than around 1998, a few years before the days of everyone having a digital camera and pictures of everything on the internet. I had a heck of a time getting all the views I needed to kitbash the model. My biggest problem was that with all my books and pictures and the limited amount on-line back then, I couldn't find a view of the east side face of the clock tower so I didn't know how to do the upper window on that side. I bought all the parts two of the "standard kits" plus a bunch of parts at my local train store, but I couldn't do that today as they mostly sell finished models (I guess built in China with cheap labor).

In 1999 I had the opportunity to go to Disneyland 4 times in one year and took extensive pictures of Main Street on FILM and then digitize over 1000 negatives and then formed composite pictures of the various blocks of Main Street in Photoshop. I had a 1 megapixel digital camera but the images were not good enough to use so I kept with the SLR and film.

The paper model of the castle are from http://www.disneyexperience.com/services/models_index.php and the Haunted Mansion is from Haunted Dimensions. In both cases I took their original versions and rescaled them to HO in Photoshop before building.

I'm pretty sure the train is a Rivarossi Reno (with Virginia and Truckee on the tender). From what I gather, they are no longer in business. I liked the look of this engine relative to the Disneyland E.P. Ripley. It has the motor in the tender which keeps the "engine" from being too bulky.

Karl, I think your Disneyland layout can't be anything but spectacular, with all those monorails! The track system really gives a lot of three-dimensional opportunity.

I thought it might be a Reno, the Rivarossi 4-4-0's run very good.

The Monorails look to be going very fast, can you tell how fast they are going in feet per second?

60 MPH is 88 feet per second so an HO train going 1 foot per second would be going about a scale 60 MPH. 1.5 feet per second would be scale 90 MPH and 2 feet per second would be 120 MPH

For the purists I know the schuco's are 1/90 not 1/87 but it will be close enough.

If we were talking purism, the steam trains should be HOn3. That's a much larger difference than between the European 1:90 HO and US 1:87 HO.

My cats would go bananas if they saw all those monorails running.

Very nice set-up. What kind of circuit are you using for the block signals?

Yeah, I think they were going too fast. Just quickly estimating, they are probably doing something like 120 MPH to scale. I think the loop with the 4 trains on it is close to a scale mile (about 100 pieces of ~7" track) and they are looping around with brief stops in about 27 seconds. I also counted track and it looks like a train went though about 4.6 feet in about 2 second (very roughly). I was basically doing a dry run of using the video camera, splicing it together on my computer and then loading it up to Youtube (something I hadn't done in over a year). Once I was done shooting and into editing/splicing I noticed that everything was zipping by pretty fast. I will try and measure things a bit better tonight.

Karl

Thanks,

I built a custom design relay circuit which was pretty simple and would let me mix and match with the original Schuco switches. I have single pole double throw magnetic reed switches to detect the trains and the only mod to the trains is to stick a 1/8" thick magnet on them. I used mostly standard eithernet (cat5/cat3) cable and connectors to make it modular and easier and cheaper to build. There is a 8 wire (24 awg wires) that then splits into two 4 wire cables; one of the splits brings the blocked center rail and the 3 wires for the signal lights, the other 4 wire split bring a constant center rail and the 3 wires for the SPDT reed switch. It nicely snaps together thanks to using common jack/plugs. It is highly fail safe in terms of a train stopping or if a switch is missed or a relay drops, the trains will stop; the tricky part is getting the trains going in the first place. I plan to send the design and bill of materials (it probably costs only about $10 per block in terms of parts and then many hundreds in terms in labor) to Doug Burwell who runs the Schuco Monorail web site http://schucodisneylandmonorail.com/ for posting on the site.