I’ve just added a page about how the project began.
First Post!
We’ve been developing a modular model railway system for a little while, and it’s time we started letting some of the ideas loose upon the world.
We used to have a little model railway – N gauge – and it seemed clear that making it bigger and better also meant making it more cumbersome, fragile, harder-to-maintain, and generally less likely to be fun.
So we embarked on developing a system whereby multiple model railway scenes could be developed independently and joined together in a flexible and free-form way, with the added constraint that the resulting systems should have approximately realistic distances between them. We want it all to be easily transportable, rugged and easy to configure and control.
The goal of the system is to make an N gauge model railway that can fill a house. Or a garden – whilst being easy to pack away at the end of the day. It will be huge!
We are building the physical connectors to join the boards, the specifications of the boards themselves (fairly liberal), plus the control electronics and software for figuring out how the boards are connected. We have a box of tools, some Arduinos, an oscilloscope, a 3D printer, a mixture of Ubuntu and WinXP PCs, and a load of software design experience.
We expect to update this site regularly with details of progress, as well as specifications of what we have developed so far.
hugemodelrailwayproject 