Hello, this is Tom in Kyiv

Hi Tom and welcome to the forum.  And my apologies, I didn't notice that your post was awaiting moderation so I just fixed that

Posted by: @hayttom

My main project is my model railway - the "Haythornthwaite and Westby Tea Railway" set in India in the early 20th century.

I was curious so I Googled "Haythornthwaite and Westby Tea Railway", as my father was born and raised in India so I was interested to find out a bit more information. All I could come up with was an old Blogspot blog written by someone named "Tom"- would that be you?

I used to be into model railways myself, a bunch of Triang HO stuff, but haven't touched it for over 25 years. Back then I automated it with a 6502 microprocessor and a bunch of hall-effect switches salvaged from an old keyboard. I wish I had the space (and time) now to revisit to, as with modern microcontrollers you could really do a great job of automating everything.

Again welcome to the forum!

😎

Bill

Welcome Tom! You might want to think of use servos for turnouts and current sensors for block detection with Arduino control.

@sj_h1  Thank you! How quickly you proved that this is a great community with valuable contributions coming in from every direction.

I think if I were starting absolutely from scratch, with the knowledge I have recently gathered, I might use servos and current sensors the way you suggest.  But I am already committed by investment and learning to the Digitrax and Loconet 'ecosystem' for railway control and Peco point (turnout) motors with Digitrax stationary decoders.  A big part of this is my exploitation of transponding for not only block detection but positive locomotive identification which depends on Digitrax proprietary hardware. 

However my transfer table and train lift and two turntables will be more home-made and that had led to my question about sensors.  A remaining problem is Arduinos listening to Loconet for commands ... that will be a fun challenge....

Thank you again!  I'm excited to be here!

Thanks Bill!

Yes, that old blog was mine and I am now startled to see how many years have passed since then with still hardly any trains moving.  But I will make progress soon!  Migrating my railway from Leicestershire in England to Kyiv in Ukraine has posed challenges (and opportunities).

Where in India was your father from?  What was his profession?  I have been to India seven times and to 71 other countries and my general observation is that India is the most colourful. I am sure you don't need to be told how impressive Indian railways are but they are so underrepresented in modelling.  I'm attaching a trick photo of a train on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway I took last year - as I expect you can guess, both locos are the same loco.

What did you do with your 6502 processor and the hall-effect switches (which you have just taught me are used in keyboards)?

You enunciate splendidly.

Sincerely,

Tom

As so many new users are mentioning their interesting first / early computer experience, I'll comment on mine.  I'm just a user rather than builder, but I do go a fair way back.

Back in high school in Ottawa (I graduated in 1980) we punched FORTRAN IV (with the University of Waterloo's WATFOR simplification) onto Hollerith cards which were sent daily to and run at Carleton University which I eventually attended.  They came back with a fanfold printout two working days later, which was often when we discovered the prank cards other students had slipped into our decks.  I learned to program algorithms but didn't learn much about computers per se.

At some stage after that I got a series of Radio Shack TRS-80s - upgrading or replacing and adding peripherals when I could.  If my memory and understanding are correct I was using a 16-bit TRS-80 when IBM PCs were still 8-bit.  (Bill or any forum member is welcome to set me straight if that doesn't make sense.)   This transitioned me to BASIC and the fascinating notion of an operating system.  The book that came with the TRS-80 was excellent - I remember a diagram of boxes representing spaces in a file for Bytes - that taught me a lot.

I took a Pascal course at Carleton and Pascal remains my favorite language.  I love the enforced logic and great flexibility of the programming structure and the specific and intentional lack of things like GOTO statements that allow sloppy coding.

My first work computer was a huge VAX at Statistics Canada in the late 80s where I made maps with ArcInfo version 3.5 using Arc Macro Language.  Jobs took so long that you would not normally want to finish the day without having left a programme running.  Maps came very slowly out of a Versatec raster plotter which was about half the size of VW Beatle.  We couldn't preview them on our terminals but we did have one very slow vector CRT.  I don't think I've seen a vector monitor ever since.

I probably didn't touch a PC until about 1990.  One summer job and one volunteer stint since then forced me onto Macs but I've never liked them or the company that makes them.  Over the last (gosh!) three decades I've 'programmed' in all sorts of environments like Lotus 123 macros and a bunch I've probably forgotten but my next serious stab at real programming has only been recently on Arduinos (C++).

Tom