Improved Operations on the Plywood Empire Route

Jan's brother Jack died recently and I wanted to remember him. I used to frequently go for a morning walk at Upper St Clair Boyce Park and then go to Jack's apartment and take him shopping. So I would be thinking about him while I walked. A railroad runs along one edge of the park and I would sometimes see a local switching job passing by. The Pittsburgh&Ohio Central  shortline railroad runs from Carnegie to Canonsburg. I obtained this O scale model of one of their engines and yes, I think of Jack every time I run that engine:

An MTH model of the EMD SW1500 switch engine.

808 units were built between June, 1966 and late 1974.

This model is fully electronic (engine sounds as well as bell and whistle) and has precision can motors with electronic governors (speed control). What this means is that even at very slow speeds motion is as smooth as silk, right down to a slow [scale] walk. Thus switching moves (pulling and setting out cars on sidings) is much more realistic than with the old Lionel postwar engines which are basically very rugged toys. There is a problem though. Lionel type couplers, although patterned after real knuckle couplers, require a lot of force to couple. So one basically has to ram two cars together for them to couple, not a very realistic operation. What I needed for slow speed coupling was brakes to hold one car in place while another car is backed against it. So I assembled several of these devices:

The basic bit is a Circuitron Tortoise slow-motion switch machine usually seen on HO pikes. It actuates a brass tube which is fitted inside a larger piece of tubing.  Installed in the roadbed adjacent to an electromagnetic uncoupler it looks like this:

In the lowered position.

In the raised position.

Here it is seen in position to stop a car from moving while a car comes from the left and pushes the coupler slowly closed until it locks. No more crashing cars together! Switching is now much more like the real thing on the Plywood Empire Route.

Video of the gadget: