Our club has a unique situation that has developed… When the layout was built 25+ years ago, the building management didn’t want public down in the basement where the layout is located. Now, thanks to public interest in the building as well as a little PR magic, we are regularly drawing several hundred visitors to our monthy open houses and upwards of 1500 to special events hosted by our club.
The problem, about 2/3rds of the layout is not visible from the public viewing area. We’d like to invite public to the back area but with a nasty duck under & cramped space, that isn’t feasable. Unfortunately, removing the duck under isn’t an option nor is expanding the layout since all of the walls are structural 3 foot thick stacked stone. The solution we’ve come up with is to setup video cameras to allow the public to see those “hidden” areas via TV(s). Eventually we might also equip engines with cameras to give a cab ride view of the layout as well.
We’d appreciate hearing from anyone who has faced similar issues and what they did to resolve them. If you used video cameras, what makes/models did you use & what was the cost?
check out some of the stores selling security cameras. Quite often they have a display with a number of them working and you can see the picture quality. Just make sure that one of the two cables is the same as you what you plug into your TV to receive your signal. Then the camera can transmit the signal straight to a TV screen.
The other option is to put the signal into a computer via a DVR board and then the signal from the camera can be recorded. Again the camera you use for this purpose can be quite varied and it also depends on your source as to how much you actually pay for such a device.
Hope it helps, I do not think that it would be of any assistance for me to show you where I purchased my cameras being that they came from a surplus store.
putting up some video cameras to show those layout areas, that cannot be viewed from the visitor´s area is a nice thing to do, but I doubt that it´ll catch much attention. I am a member of a group of model railroaders who model a narrow gauge line on a modular basis. As we are not a club, we have public operating sessions usually in halls or a gymnasium, which we usually connect with a charity drive. We have two video trains operating with big screen displays and believe me, this the main attraction!
I have an old video camera with a broken tape transport mechanism. However, it still functions quite well as a camera. You might check with people to see if anyone has one of these lying around. Call up some video-repair places, and see if they have any of these. My guess is that they’re not worth the cost of repairing, but if all you need is a camera they will do the job fine.
I would invest in a couple of small train-cams. You can put these into a dummy locomotive, and run that as the lead engine of a consist. I’ve got one in the first car of a subway train. Or, you could install one looking out the back window of a caboose for variety.
These are the kind that I prefer, itmakes more sense since forward you can’t see the nose of the engine in the vid.
Oh, and if you do this, besure to see about signal reciever boosters. One of my pet peeves is the cams that spend most of it’s time in static because it can’t revieve a strong signal. Tunnels you can’t do much about, but distance you can.