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The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.

2022-09-19 - Automation Updates

Category Randall

The automation runs 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. That's a lot of runtime for HO train engines which are not designed to run that much in their entire lifetime.

Consequently, for each mainline automated train, I have 2 similar engines with the goal of swapping them on a regular basis. I've done the UP engine a few times yet I have not rotated the Freight train engines in a while, and I finally got around to it today:


NS 1072 Heritage “Illinois Terminal” is back on Freight automation. 

On the Branchline side, Santa Fe 804 has been behaving neatly and I just added a car and a caboose to it:

I'll need to carefully monitor that for the next few days to ensure this combo does not derail. The branch line track can be very finicky in a couple of specific places.


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