My operating scheme calls for a number of commuter trains to arrive each morning in my main city, spend the day parked in the coach yard, and then depart in the evening. Originally I intended, to detail the interiors and have passengers on board but the though hit me that since the coaches are going to spend the day in the coach yard, it would look silly to have people sitting in them all day. I decided it is a much better option to leave the passenger cars empty which will be less obvious when the trains are moving. Maybe someday, someone will create an interior with pop-up passengers tied to a decoder, but for now, this seems to me to be the best solution, also the cheapest. My passenger fleet will be mostly riderless and the interiors unlit to hide this fact. An exception will be a train that passes through overnight. That equipment will have lighted interiors and people on board. The lighting will be tied to a decoder so it can be shut off at approprate times. That should create a dramatic effect during night operations.
You will also save yourself quite a bit of money. Last summer I stocked 12 passenger cars (Preiser seated passengers) with passengers, and it added up quick. Fortunately 5 of them were sleepers, so I didn’t need as many passengers for those cars. I did stock my dome with passengers, and that made a huge difference. This was for a late 50s combined Super Chief/El Capitan, so I don’t have the situation you do with coach yard and commuter ops.
I have also been speaking with a couple of folks about installing a decoder in passenger cars for lighting control, so it is great to hear from someone that will be doing this. We discussed a decoder in each car and assigning each car a number so you could control each car individually. Please keep us updated on the results. How are you going to power the decoders, and what type of decoder are you going to use?
Smitty, I really haven’t looked into this in detail. I have only read that it can be done but as far as the how-tos, I am pretty ignorant at this point. I have an old set of Roundhouse Palace cars, still unbuilt, that I plan to put together as a refurbished overnight first class train with detailed interiors, lighting and passengers. At one time, Roundhouse offered interior kits for these cars but since they have been taken over by Horizon, the Roundhouse product line has been greatly curtailed, and I am guessing these interior kits are probably casualties of the takeover. I haven’t checked their website recently but I am not optimistic. I’ll probaby have to find a suitable supplement.
My thinking on the decoders is that it would be cheaper to have a single decoder control all the cars but the disadvantage is the wiring would require permanent coupling. I want this train to pick up a and drop off a sleeper car in route so likely I will end up with a decoder for each car.
We also discussed wiring between the cars through the windows in the end doors, which would be fine for the train I mentioned above (long distance, no change in consist), EXCEPT what happens when you have to go through a smaller turnout? We determined there would be too much lateral offset between the cars to allow for wiring. Lighting and power for the lighting has been on the forefront of my future plans for passenger car modeling. I think what is slowing me down with this is me trying to complicate things more than they need to be.
You may want to take a look at the below link for interiors. I have purchased their interiors for my Hi Level cars and really like 'em. They hay not have the detail you may get with Precision Scale or Red Cap stuff, but they are cheaper and simple to assemble…
http://www.palacecarco.com/index_mdc_palace.htm
Edit: I can’t recall the particulars, but someone was telling me about a really simple 3 function decoder that is relatively in-expensive. If you were not aware of these, I will try to find out exactly what he was talking about.
Adding a magnetic reed switch to each car would be cheaper than buying even one decoder, and it would still give you individual control of lighting without having to pull the car off the track to flip a physical switch on the underside.
I haven’t tried this, but how about putting a dark centerboard down the middle of a car full of passengers? When the light are off, it would not be obvious that anyone was in the train, because the interior would be dark, and there would be no through-lighting coming from the other side. Once the lights are on (one light on each side of the centerboard, of course) then the car would suddenly appear populated.
Mister B:
That is a good thought on the centerboard, but take a look at this pic…
That is a sleeper with full interior partitions, and you can still see the people. I do like the idea of passengers that can “pop” up and down, especially for commuter ops. You could drop off and pick up passengers at every stop (assuming that you could control each passenger seperately, which would be a tough one to pull off).
No doubt I will be labeled as a smart-[censored] for this, but in about 30-40 years, nanotechnology should reach the point where you can have realistic figures of passengers get on and off your trains under their own power, operate the locomotives from the cab, and in fact, operate the railroad just like the real one (perhaps even build the thing for you as well). All you’ll have to do is railfan (assuming the nano-bots don’t forbid photography).
Of course, you might want to consider changing your name to Lemuel Gulliver in that event. [(-D].
Andre
If you have facilities to turn the train at the end of the runs, you could place figures on one side of the cars only. When running one way the figures would be visible, and not so running the opposite direction. (run from station 1 w passengers then turn while “parked” - turn & run back to station 2 w passengers then turn for next “parked” session)[?][2c]
what about using the couplers and diaphrams to transfer the electricity? I don’t have the specifics worked out yet, but if you’d hook up the positive wire to the couplers and the negative wire to the diaphrams, you would have a circuit.
I’m thinking like it’d look like this:
I was going to outfit my heavyweights with passengers and realized it will cost too much money. Also I tend to damage roofs getting into the [censored] cars.
Maybe with the Rapidos I will have better luck with click off, click on roof and be more willing to insert pre-completed preiser people into those cars.
If I ever put people into a passenger train, I would start with the diner. Those large windows show empty tables. While I am at it, I gotta see if I can reduce a picture of a dinner set to HO scale and fit a very small image or several thin plastic disks for plates and athearn light tubes for drinks. I dont know yet. Probably the glue blobs will give it all away.
Regarding moving people while we are at it, equipt each of them with QSI sound and speakers and have every one of them have a personality and a motion sensor to boot. I can see it… bang a pullman too hard while switching (Becuase the snoring drifted the tired switcher to doze off) you might hear 20 voices rising in protest, some squeals, some angry and others calling for the porter to clean up the mess.
Maybe we should not have a perfect replication of a snoring pullman train, that will be TOO relaxing for the hobby.
Well, they already make audio circuits for cows, sheep and hogs. They are motion-sensitive and will start mooing, bahing and oinking, respectively, if you jar the stock car. So, all you have to do is figure out how to replace the barnyard sounds with snoring Pullman passengers. Or, leave the animals on-board and really shock your operators if they’re not gentle enough.
Don’t replace the barnyard sounds - the pigs would be great in a dining car!![C=:-)]
This points out one more reason for not having passengers on board. Except for tail end obs cars, real railroads don’t turn passenger cars, they flip the seats to face the opposite direction. My commuter operations are point to loop so on a car’s first trip out and back, the seats will be facing forward. They will not get turned before the next trip so they will be facing backward. This will be the case for every other trip. With empty seats, that will not be so obvious but with passengers on board, it would stick out like a sore thumb.
I will have a few through passenger trains that will always be running forward and won’t get parked in the yard, so it might make sense to populate these, but the commuter fleet will have to do with just ghost riders.
[:o)]Be prototypical. Run the cars empty all the time[:o)]
Passengers for your cars are pretty cheap IF you learn how to paint them yourself. I figure painted Preiser figures average about a buck a piece, unpainted ones are about a nickel. They aren’t that hard to paint. Like anything else, practice makes perfect.
Rivarossi/IHC cars can be easy to remove the roofs on - they have tabs sticking down that snap into the floor, remove the tabs and the roofs come off quite nicely. The interior can then easily be removed, so you could have one interior ‘empty’ and one ‘full’.
I guess however I would question how much attention do operators pay to cars sitting in a yard anyway?? I would put passengers in them…but if it bothers you to have the loaded cars sitting in the yard, maybe you could have your commuter trains start and end off-layout in a staging yard or something??
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The expense is the least of my concerns. I purposely designed the layout to allow station switching of passenger equipment so sending the terminating trains to a staging yard would eliminate a very interesting operation. Besides, the coach yard is already in place and it’s not going anywhere.
Two sets of interiors would require manual handling of the equipment twice for every operating day. Eventually, the removing of the roofs and interiors that often is going to take its toll.
So it comes down to whether I want my moving trains empty or my parked trains full. The latter option iis the one that will put the greatest strain on reality. I can run empty passenger equipment and not notice but seeing a coach yard full of passengers every time a train passes by would definitely be an eye catcher and not a very good one.
Don’t know if this thread is still alive but in reading it I had a thought come to mind and I may even explore it for myself.
There is a material used alot in theatrical settings, called scrim, its function is to hide things behind a screen until you want them seen. It is done strictly with lighting. If you shine lights on the front of the screen making it the dominant light source, its opaque, shine light on the back of the screen, and its almost transparent.
So, place strips of this materail on the windows of your car or cars and figure how your going to switch the lights on and off, (you can probalby get small sample swatches for nothing or nearly nothing from a theratrical or stage lighting site or store). When runing, the cars will be lit, the dominant light source will be inside, and the passanges inside should be visable, when parked the lights are off thereby making the exterior lighting the dominant light source, and the windows should be opaque. You can even get black scrim material so the interiors will appear black. Without interior lights on, the outside should be bright enought for the effect to work, if not add some security lights in the yard near the cars in question.
That’s the therory anyway.
Just a thought, and I don’t know if the material will actually work at these scales, that is, will there be enough of the mess material to do the job in such tiny pieces/spaces. But that said, I will try in on my set up… just because.
I was the one who started this thread and was a little surprised to see it get resurrected. Your idea is an interesting one and certainly worth a shot. However, I think this falls into the category of fine detailing that is done after the layout is relatively completed. With about half my layout still unscenicked, I have bigger fish to fry right now. For now, the empty passenger cars are OK with me. It is my feeling that detail that is miss
Just pretend your trains are like the airlines and your passengers are stuck sitting in the cars for 10 hours before they depart the station.
Rapido cars - or their new lighting system to add to cars - turn on and off with a magnet wand - this makes the use of scrims more practical.[8D]