Universal Railway Bus | Hacker News Reader

Universal Railway Bus

arduinorailwaycontrol.com

31 pointslaurensr16 comments

This is neat, and as someone who wants to eventually build a layout in his basement I'm glad there's continued development of these types of projects, but I'm not sure I see how this is going to be simpler than DCC. The complexity of programming DCC is called out, but reprogramming and designing an "infinitely variable" Arduino based solution is almost certainly going to be way more complex

Maybe that complexity is the selling point, in that you may be able to do things DCC can't, but approaching this as easier than DCC seems off base

Pretty cool for train hobbyists.

...although from the title, I was expecting some kind of bus that runs on train tracks :P

Have you heard of the FCD Railbus? An experiment by the New Haven Railroad in the 1950's to do just that...

In the end, it was more cost-effective for the New Haven to just go bankrupt

In case you haven’t seen the recent Tom Scott video about a bus that rides the rails in Japan: https://youtu.be/Kn56bMZ9OE8

Would this have any advantages over trams, though? I can think of one disadvantage: rails would be higher than the road, disrupting cars and bicycles, whereas the grooves that trams follow can usually be crossed by cars or bicycles.

Oh, ok, here you go:

https://macsmotorcitygarage.com/for-both-road-and-rail-the-e...

This looks like something out of the Fahrenheit 451 movie.

Any suggestions for a semi usable track system for moving small items around the house or office?

Most such systems are made for industry and very expensive.

Would be fun to make a railway that could move soft drinks around the building or pick items from the shed and deliver to the workshop.

have you considered lego? "L gauge" is a fun standard, plus having the extensibility and parts via lego is pretty amazing.

I thought Lego discontinued their train stuff... surprised to see it is still going.

Do you source real Lego or the Lego-compatible knock-off stuff e.g. Lepin? I'm not much of a lego guy, but I would think at house-scale it would get cost prohibitive pretty quickly to use genuine Lego unless there was a compelling reason to e.g. I don't know if the knock-off stuff is as structurally sound.

Lego seems to continually discontinue the trains and then release a new version with slightly different parts. Thankfully they tend to be backward compatible (but not always forward).

And no, I use real Lego parts. There is a huge quality difference, especially against lepin

FWIW there's a bar in Prague that delivers beers on trains.

Can it work with Märklin ? Märklin runs over CAN, in a well-documented way (but docs only in German, argh).

To answer my own question: apparently not, as it is DC only.

Does this work with jmri?

Nice to hear about this! It stands for Java Model Railroad Interface.

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