Moving Traffic
Ever since catching a fleeting glimpse on a Japanese blog of moving traffic in T Gauge, I figured it ought to be easy enough to do in Z Scale. Oddly, what I anticipated to be the easiest part turned out to be the biggest challenge: finding miniature plastic link chain.
Hours of searching on Google yielded nothing but "fat" plastic chain nearly the size of bicycle chain. I ordered some anyway, thinking I could perhaps make do, but with tight clearances under many of the streets—the town resides on an access panel covering a helix of track—it simply wasn't going to work. Fortunately I did some grumbling while visiting Rick Spano a few months later; he'd just found some miniature plastic link chain, and sent me the link (no pun intended). The source: Robot Objects.
The great thing is that Robot Objects offers chain (by the foot), sprockets and gearhead motors, so you can get everything you need in one place. Well, almost everything; the other primary ingredient is micro-miniature rare earth magnets, which you can get by the hundred for less than ten dollars at Magcraft.
Luckily the arrangement of streets in the town of Naughtright permitted a continuous loop of traffic. Even better: cars could run in both directions for a more realistic effect, with the traffic split across separate streets in one area for added interest—actually a necessity so that there was room for the two drive sprockets. The biggest stroke of luck, however, was that the drive motors were situated in locations that did not have hidden track underneath, which might have been a showstopper.
One downer to having moving traffic was that I'd wanted to have a set of working stoplights at the corner of Main Street and Railroad Avenue. With no moving traffic, the lights could cycle continuously with no visual incongruity. If I had only one loop of cars, I could conceivably synchronize the lights with their movements such that no one ran a red light; however, the two sets of moving cars have loops of different lengths, which make their movement "syncopated"—that is, they follow no predictable pattern. This is highly desirable from a visual effect standpoint, but it also makes synchronizing the lights impossible. So, I've ditched the plan for stoplights, and may put in flashers instead.
The illustration at right (click to enlarge) shows the two traffic loops, as well as the drive sprockets. One possible fly in the ointment is that all of the streets run on slopes—nothing is dead flat. But some quick tests with the chain proved it could handle slight perpendicular twisting, so everything should be fine. Because the slopes are steepest at the drive sprockets, they would have to be installed on a slight angle.
As of 26 September 2008, this is where the project stands. More as it happens.
The traffic routes are represented here by the two pink loops.
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