Subject:
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Re: Lessons learned in pre-school
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Mon, 10 Jan 2005 13:11:43 GMT
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Viewed:
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2208 times
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In lugnet.trains, Christopher Masi wrote:
> Since the kids love that full power setting, they would just floor it
> the second they got to the controller. If that didn't pop a knuckle, and
> it almost always did, then the second favorite maneuver was more than
> sufficient to pop a knuckle. The second favorite thing to do was, of
> course, rapidly change from full power foward to full power reverse and
> back again. If I didn't get back in time to pop the power supply off the
> track a teriffic crash resulted. There were more than a couple of times
> where the engineer got to talk face-to-face with the conductor who was
> sitting in the caboose. On this day I wished that I had used my high
> strength train couplers. I stopped using them because they cause
> problems on the uneven NELUG tables. They would have worked perfectly on
> the nice level floor of the pre-school.
I noticed this and now have a doubly modified controller. A switch in one end
drops the output voltage over the whole range. A switch in the other end
engages a full rectifier on the output. These switches are push-type, glued
into the base of the controller with holes drilled in line with them. You poke
an axle or goalie-prod in the hole to operate the switch.
Funny thing is, most of the kids using it didn't actually notice that the
controller couldn't reverse the train, or see anything wrong in that.
The slight complication is that the diodes of the rectifier also drop the output
voltage, such that if you engage both switches the train barely moves.
The voltage drop of the rectifier isn't quite enough to ensure the trains stay
on the track though. A rapid stop/start on a corner could dislodge an engine
that had a few heavy trucks behind it. I'm thinking of adding another diode
just for safety, but maybe it's more fun with a little bit of an edge to it.
Jason Railton
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Lessons learned in pre-school
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| On Friday, I brought some trains to my son's pre-school. It was a crazy and hectic event. I thought I would share with you the ideas that worked and the ones that didn't work. First, they loved seeing all the trains, and they were more than happy to (...) (20 years ago, 10-Jan-05, to lugnet.trains)
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