How to Incorporate Signaling Systems into Model Railroads

Hello everyone, and welcome to Model Railroad Academy. I'm your host and editor, Steve Doyle along with model railroading expert Doug Hodgdon. Mr. Clickety, and Mr. Clack for those of you familiar with our track talk live event on M.R.A. Doug, we're often asked how do I make my model railroad not only look but behave the way that the prototypes, the real railroads do. And one aspect it's visually impactful is signaling. Tell me about the history of signaling on the real railroads. Well, as traffic increased on real railroads they realized they needed signaling, detection and signaling to prevent collisions and keep the trains on schedule, and for safety. And that would be a semaphore light or it could be a target light to show that a block is occupied. So essentially the same thing, when you came to a roadway as automobile traffic became more prevalent in the in the 1900's, you needed something to tell you a train was coming to activate a gate or flashing signals. And then when the train had passed to turn everything off again. So that's the challenge we're faced in model railroading. We have a solution, there are several solutions out by different manufacturers. Today. We're going to be previewing the Azatrax D2T Crossing Dual Detector which essentially uses infrared rays that bounce off the bottom of a car, a passing train and tells the signal to activate. So right out of the box, Doug, what's included with D2T? What's included is the circuit board, color coded wiring for the transmitters and receivers. So you have one set either side of the grade crossing and that's what activates the lights before the train gets there. Mmm-hmm. So if you've got the signal, the input signal and then you've got a receiver at each end. So two aspects of each sensor. Yeah. So a set for either side of the grade crossing which will work for trains going either direction. Okay. Was it easy to set up? All I did was drill holes in between a couple of ties here, here, and here dropped them down the sensors, as you said Steve, needed to reflect off the bottom of the car. So you want to get them depending on your scale and all that, get them close enough so that the reflection will happen. Easy to follow directions? Simple. And like I say, all color coded everything is labeled on the circuit board. So lets see how it works. We'll power it up. Yep. And the train is going to pass over the first sensors which tells the gate to go. Now there's a delay built in if your train is shorter than the distance between the two sensors. So we go over here. And that was really slick. Yeah. Its just that easy. Now there's a lot more that comes in this board than what we're showing you here, activating capabilities. One is crossing Gates and what would we need for that? These are separate products, by the way. This board will activate a relay, which in turn will activate a Circuitron Tortoise. Motor. Switch motor. Mounted horizontally where the normal case would be vertical. It's mounted horizontally so that it can activate a rod that runs up to the gates. The gate like this. So it's really very slick. We've only showed you a couple of the capabilities here, but if you want to run your railroad in a much more prototypical way and make a great visual impact to visitors to your layout, consider detecting systems on your layout. Don't you think? By all means, it's cool. And you can do other things too. There are other boards available from Azatrax That will do a light up indicator light on a panel to tell you a block is occupied. Very slick! Give it a try in your layout. Thanks for joining us.