Garden Railway Forum

A year after the great move up North and I am ready to start building the new garden layout. But I thought it would be nice to incorporate some roads or at least farm tracks in with the railway, and then I got to thinking that it might be nice to have a Landrover plodding along the road.

But how to do it? There are systems that use chains with magnets running under the road, but using them, all the traffic moves at a really unrealistic constant speed.
There's another system that uses self powered vehicles that are guided by a little magnet following an iron wire under the road surface. But that only works on a very smooth plasticard road, I want a dirt track.
I could just use radio control, but I would like the vehicle to be autonomous, any ideas?

On a slight tangent possibly connected: I had an idea for an automated driving truck or tender to be hitched behind a radio controlled loco, the driving truck could pick up location data from RFID tags buried under the track and speed and acceleration from the rotation of the axles and thus a small Arduino type computer would have all the data needed to drive the train, when and where to stop at stations, to slow down for bends or throttle up to go up gradients. Would there be any takers for that?

Have you seen Greg's thread re his R/C traction engine?
https://gardenrails.org/forum/viewtopic ... ion+engine

I have seen something similar in the past few months the trouble is I can't remember where. It was possibly RM web or maybe the 0 Gauge guild and I thought at the time it was quite realistic. A landrover drove a prescribed route up a mountain track with changes of direction effected by magnets on the roadside and control circuits onboard the landrover responding the the number and position of the magnets. When the vehicle reached the highest point of its route it simply reversed back the way it had come and the process began again. Because of the very slow speed of the vehicle, I would say about a scale walking speed it all looked very convincing but to my mind an awful lot of work. One thing I haven't mentioned is that this was done using a 1:12 scale landrover presumably the space in the larger vehicle was needed for the battery packs and steering motors which would be OK if you are modelling in 7/8ths.