Making a Train Lift

Pulleys or gears sounds fraught with difficulty - it'll be swinging about, one corner will be down, etc, etc.

How about having the lifting traverser (?) on a pair of parallel arms (like a parallel ruler, turned on its edge) which will lift it back and down (or forward and up, if you want)?

R.

Have a look at:

How about something like the scissors car jack? What distance are you lifting through? Regards, Bill.

Peter Denny of Buckingham etc fame, made a working vertical lift. It is described in the Wild Swan book about his experiences in modelling. It appears to be mainly built of ply with meccano parts for the mechanisim. It was probably first printed in RM sometime in the 1970s or early 80s.

Regards, Greg.P.

snipped-for-privacy@mwfree.net wrote:

The height of the lift will be about 5 inches, 2.5 ins to allow clearance for the train and 2.5 ins to allow for the depth of the baseboard. I probabley need to add on a bit to give me access to deal with derailments etc but 5 ins in the minimum. The lift above looks interesting but a bit elaborate for my needs I think but at least it has been done before.

Kevin

I hadn't thought of that, might need to counterbalance it in some way to prevent a sudden drop.

Kevin

Call me daft but, my wife is a pharmacy technician and she has a piece of machinery at her place of work call a 'Pharmatrieve' this is effectively a cylindrical drum with floating shelves that stay level as the drum turns. I've been thinking that a similar piece of kit could act as, not only a train lift, but also a multi train storage area. The docking of such a device would be relatively easy to acheive using a Geneva gear or a stepper motor controller. I am not sure how big it would need to be (diameter wise) but I would think 12" or so would suffice for 5 trains (arranged in a hexagonal pattern around the drum) giving 3" clearance on each track.

HTH

Andrew

Just discovered that there is a video clip of the lift in action.

Kevin

WOW. Not what I would ever think of doing, but that IS impressive. The video is average though... But I guess you want to not limit to just Broadband users...?

Andy

In message , Andrew writes

As you might imagine, our friends from the wrong side of the pond have been there before, and you can buy a ready-made "train elevator". Unfortunately it is a bit pricey, with a 6-foot version costing $480 + postage. However, you might be interested enough to take a look at their web site, which is at

What about a Yorkshire Woodcraft spiral as advertised in the Toddler?

You will still need a hell of a lot of room for it. My attic layout has not shortage of long thin (20" wide) space but no large 36" square areas.

Wasn't there a chat a while back about derailments on helices, and what to do about runaway truck and coache and the like.

Andrew

Such a lift was described in a Great Model Railroads article IIRC, two or three years ago. A whole section of the lower level was elevated to connect with the upper one. The maker used screw-rods and motors, but I can't recall all the details of power interlocking, track alignment, etc. Shouldn't be too hard to design from the above hints, if you really want one of your own. :-)

HTH

there is a site called :

make a train elevator which has good storage capacity, to my mind 6ft in length is a bit limited and it is pricey at around 250 sterling before duty but with a capacity of 7 trains maybe it's worth it.

Wolf, maybe it was Dick Roberts article 'Going Up , the helix killer etc.' in the Model Railroad Planning 2001 that you are referring to? It was certainly a well engineered design and used a gravity operated safety gate across the layout access tracks.

Anyway maybe a search of the Model Railroader / Kalmbach publication site might reveal something? They may have a back-number or article copy facility.

Regards

Len

Correct. Looked good, but morer complex than I would attempt. But then I don't need this kind of device. A 13ft x 16" shelf with a passing track, a couple of yard tracks, and a couple of industrial spurs does for me.

Sofar. :-)

Coincidentally I recently saw mention of such a device in Model Railroader, plus in the back pages an advertisement for a commercial unit (no, it wasn't cheap either). Unfortunately I don't have the edition of the magazine to hand so that's as much (or as little) help as I can offer.

...

I wouldn't call it daft at all. I'd been thinking of a similar device myself, albeit only about half a metre in length. I have a short shelf layout and was considering a traverser in place of the present storage roads. It occured to me something like you describe would offer more storage plus not needing to extend so far out of the front and back of the layout.

Another idea was a set of stacked carousels to hold locomotives when not in use on a exhibition layout, one member has an awful lot of locomotives. I started off thinking about using a turntable to save space and then thought why not make it move vertically as well as rotate.

The initial idea is as far as I've got in both cases.

Ther's an article on building a vertical-lift/stacker in the Iain Rice book 'Mainlines in Modest Spaces (page 35)

(kim)