Video Camera Car

I believe there are micro 'spy' cameras small enough to fit in an HO locomotive. I know of a club (Amherst Belt Lines) that has a loco equiped with such a camera, which they run on their modular layout at the Amherst Railway Big Railroad Show every year. They set up some TV monitors around the layout showing the live video feed.

Those have been around for a number of years, and our club has one.

The problems with it are that (1) the picture quality isn't very good, much less Hi-Def color, (2) the picture isn't wide-screen format, and (3) there is no sound pickup.

~Pete

The quality of the picture of the Amherst Belt Lines camera loco seems pretty good (except for minor glitches -- I suspect a 'noisy' environment (RF noise of various sorts). I expect wide screen and sound pickup are probably only a few years away.

Neat! Please be sure to let us know if you put some up on youtube or other similar places we can enjoy viewing them.

Hi , great idea, can You give some details about the camera ?

Brand , model number , cost , bought from , and most important tech details on the cam.

ah, almost forgot, type of LED's and resistor/s value etc.

Thanks.

Dave.

It was a Christmas present, and I've got no info on price or technical details.

The LEDs are white 3v. types that were on a 20-light string of Christmas lights I bought several of at a discount store for $5.00 to use for structure lights on my layout. (That's only 25 cents per LED and I couldn't resist buyig enough for the entire layout.)

I just strung three of 'em together in series so they'd work with a normal 9v. battery -no resistors and no on-off switch: just a plug- and glued them into tubes so the the light would mostly project out ahead of the car as it would with locomotive headlights.

~Pete

Hi Pete ,

ah, ok.

Thanks for the tech info on the LED's.

Shall look into the camera further.

Thanks again.

Dave

Sure, it is nice to watch a high quality recorded video. The live video versions of the cameras however, even though they lack the quality and resolution have one important feature: they can be watched live.

Think of this scenario: The DCC equipped N scale layout is downstairs. You and friends are sitting in the living room on the couch in front of large screen TV holding a radio throttle and a beer. The video receiver is hooked up to the TV and the camera is on the train controlled by your radio throttle. So you can drive your train around the layout and throw switches while seeing "out of the cab" view of the layout. How cool is that?

I did record some runs around the layout but that was my first attempt at editing the videos so the quality is not the best.

?v=-WaHFCGzv_8&feature=plcp?v=bKxC-KB9UXc&feature=plcp Peteski

Not really any more "cool" than running Tranz

Well, no. We tried that and found that the onboard transmitter system didn't work worth a darn on really large layouts. And for two different reasons:

1.) The transmitter simply doesn't have enough range to reach from the train to the base station when the loco is at the opposite end of the layout; circa 120' away. 2.) Reception tends to be spotty and static-filled even at reasonably close range because the base station picks up all sorts of unwanted electrical interference caused -presumably- by the layout wiring and sparking from the multiple motor armatures.

Not particularly. When our club is running trains at an operating session we are all busy running our *own* trains, and we don't have time to do that and also watch the view from the cab of someone else's loco. Having a recording means that we can watch together at our club meetings between operating sessions- or watch the DVD at home whenever the mood strikes us.

If watching live turns your crank, then more power to you. But we do it the way we do because we tried the live version first and we like the recorded version better.

~Pete

2ghz cameras work a lot better than the old ones, especially if you can put the receiver somewhere over the middle of your layout. 120 feet though, yeah, that's gonna be tricky.

One great thing about having a wireless camera handy, even if it's simply attached to a small monitor you can put nearby, is using it to search the covered sections of your layout. It's great for finding stuff that fell off a train or derailed cars. I have a little lorex camera (it's a cylinder about an inch in diameter and two inches long) that I can just drop into a flatcar and push around with a work engine if we need to check something out. The camera by itself is also nice for getting shots of the layout at track level, but your recording model works fine for that too. *

I think you totally missed my point. The point was that we were not just passively watching. We were actually operating the train live, on an N scale layout, from a remote location while displaying the live feed on a large TV screen. Yes, that turns my crank much more than recording a run then just watching the video later. How boring is that? Kind of like watching some computer train simulator. ;-)

To each his own I guess... Peteski

No. Not at all.

There used to be this German web site with a web camera overlooking a model train layout with two or three trains. Visitors to the site could select a train and a destination on the layout from a web form and the webserver would operate the train(s) to get the train from one siding to another. I believe it was a moderately popular website at the time...

Do you mean the "Interactive Model Railroad" at TU-Freiberg ? It still exists, see here:

Unfortnately, it does not seem to be operating... :-(

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I can not test it because it uses Java, and Firefox refuses to enable that... :-( Are you sure it doesn't work ? In that case I should mark it "disabled"!

Dear Users

The Computer Sceince Departement of the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany used to run the Internet Model Railroad on this Website. Unfortunately the laboratory in which the layout was sitting is needed for another experiment, the X-SITE. Unfortunately the University could not find another suitable room for the layout and the computers. In November of 2008 we had to dismantle the Internet Model Railroad. It will not be set up again.

The Internet Model Railroad has been a quite popular experiment in Internet based remote control and streaming. The experiment had grown out of a small layout and a video stzreaming system we had built at the University of Ulm starting in 1995 (see our paper from 1996 ). After a break in 2001 and 2002, we extended and enhanced the experiment at Freiberg starting in 2003. We were able to conduct extensive experiments in Internet video streaming with it. More than 2 Million visitors have played with our Internet Model Railroad in almost 12 years.

The department of computer science is now working on a Internet remote control experiment with little robots playing soccer.

I want to express my gratitude to all participants of the experiment, particularly to Dr. Heiner Wolf, Dr. Steffen Rudolf, and the many students for their relentless work in the design, implementation, and operation of the Internet Model Railroad.

Prof. Dr. Konrad Froitzheim

The page 'works', but says that the layout is not available. The formatting of the page is somewhat broken. I don't know if that is just bad (old?) HTML or broken CSS or related to Firefox under Linux (as opposed to IE under MS-Windows, etc.).

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