When you have absent to the difficulties of building your have yard railway, probabilities are fairly fantastic that at some stage, you are heading to want to incorporate a locomotive of some kind. Just after all, nobody wishes to be trapped using muscle mass ability to transfer carts all over. But what just are you heading to energy your locomotive with? And will it be up to the tasks you envision it managing?
Answering this sort of questions calls for rigorous calculations utilizing established engineering concepts — or, if you’re [Tim] from the Way Out West channel on YouTube, just throwing a pneumatic motor on wheels and viewing what takes place. The railway that [Tim] constructed is for his farm in County Cork, exactly where he programs to use it to haul wooden that he’ll make charcoal from. We’ve observed a very little about his rails and rolling inventory just before, which has been a low-finances and delightfully homebrewed enterprise. So as well with his pneumatic motor, noticed in the online video beneath, which makes use of cam-operated valves to command a pair of repurposed hydraulic cylinders to change a significant flywheel.
Working with scuba tanks, [Tim] was capable to electric power the motor for a complete fourteen minutes — extremely encouraging. But would the motor have the oomph necessary for actual farm do the job? To solution that, [Tim] plunked the motor on a spare bogie, connected the engine shaft to one particular of the axles with a size of rope, and let it go. Even with no optimization and zero mechanical advantage, the motor was quickly ready to shift a large load of sleepers. The makeshift pneumatic railway even managed to have its very first passenger, [Tim]’s very trusting spouse [Sandra].
There’s obviously extra work to do right here, and quite a few challenges to defeat. But we seriously enjoy the “just try out it” strategy [Tim] utilized right here, and with a lot of what he does.
