I recently purchased several closed circuit TV systems. This was prompted by two things. First, I finished the roughed in scenery liftouts, built using styrofoam and Rubber Rocks, that conceal the backside of my folded dogbone trackage. Second, I added a staging yard in an adjacent room.
I found the black-and-white CCTV systems for $50 each. They consist of a small monitor and two cameras. The monitor has a switch so that you can select either camera or set it to automatically switch between the two at a variable rate. The cameras have swivel mounts and infra-red LEDs so that they can see in the dark. The kit comes with 60 foot cables for each camera, which also supply power to them. This is just the ticket for all your under layout needs, since they need no other illumination, at least at close ranges involved in most model RR apps.
There are three drawbacks so far, none of them major considering the price. First is the need for a monitor for every two cameras, as that is the limit of inputs on it. Second is that the infra-red LEDs don’t really light up very far in totally dark conditions. The overview camera for the staging yard has to be in such a position to see the greater portion of it so that it is about 4 feet away and I really need to turn on the room lights in there to see what is going on well. The system probably works fine at night out of doors with the ambient light, but it’s much darker in my baement utility room with no windows. At the ends of my underlayout sidings, the infra-red works fine for seeing what’s going on, probably because more than enough light leaks in under the layout that it’s more than enough. Third, the cameras have a fixed focus, which seems to not be optimal in several of my locations. As it is, it’s not worth my trouble to readjust the original mounting points to see if it will help. I can see what’s going on and this is definitely not HD TV!
This is a real boon to those of us who have defied the model railroading gods by d