With such a large layout, with multiple points of interest and so many cameras, there would need to be some kind of live producer. That person would need to switch different cameras to the web feed according to where things were most interesting at that moment. Streaming the thumbnails screen which David showed on this video would be possible, but would probably not make good viewing once it had been through streaming compression.
No doubt several viewers have no knowledge of the topics you describe, me being one of them, but I find it fascinating watching and try to comprehend. In all the misery we are currently experiencing it is nice to see you looking so contented. Well done David and the team. Cheers, Bob
I have been following McKinley from the first video in 09. What an awesome layout. It has inspired me over the years as I have been building my layout.
I was wondering if you would link up with Hans from IoTT one day. Would like to see some more about use of the database and interfaces, MQTT and so on. This opens up a whole realm of linked automation (including layout lighting, for instance).
Fabulous updates and, as always at McKinley, a very high level of detail and attention to the peripherals such as lighting and cameras. Brilliant stuff
What you have been achieving with the technical and IT side fascinates me. I had a similar issue with video cameras on my layout (a fraction of the size of McKinley) but what I did was take the video outputs from the cameras into a secondhand Extron video matrix and then used Traincontroller to switch the video matrix as a train progresses through blocks along the line. I had to build a DCC to RS232 converter to control the matrix but it works well. Basically it means that I can automatically follow a train on a video monitor. Hope that may be of interest.
David, Being a bear of little brain this is all above my pay level. But now you are finally here I think McKinley is going to be a lot of fun to operate. I bet the team and yourself can't wait to get started. If you wanted to could you run a train by yourself just for fun. Not part of the timetable? Still it's all starting to come to the boil. David, thank you for your time. Cheers, Chris Perry.
Absoloutely outstanding, 13 years ago it was mighty impressive and to see the expansion coming to the point of some running sessions is beyond exciting.
This is great and we will be soon seeing trains in action. Can't wait for the next update with the operating procedures and your team actually running trains
Once again, this is fantastic. I'd hate to think what the final price will be. It will be great to see operating sessions up and running, even without complete scenery. Speaking of which, have you got room to create a static rail museum in your scenery, like our real life Newport Railway Museum in Melbourne, where very old extremely weathered locos (or restored old engines) are pushed away into a couple of cramped old rail sidings, where people can visit and climb over the old engines. Or, as time progresses on your railway, you could have an occasionally well presented excursion train. When did old excursion trains all polished up become a thing? Oh well. You couldn't possibilty do all the things that people think of, but it is fun thinking of them. Once again, great to get every update. If looks fantastic.
Two thousand I/O and that’s before you add all the engine decoders you have to talk to, that’s one whopping machine and control process - many automated factories will be well short of that. Great to see it all coming together and also your pleasure in what you have all achieved. Model train engineering and automation at its best. Best regards Stephen
The push buttons were sourced from AliExpress, the T-Button Switches store. We used a 19mm metal momentary push button with a green 12V LED. The push button interfaces to the micro controller which runs the green LED at 5V giving acceptable brightness. The "arrow" in the push button can be aligned to point towards the uncoupler. See Episode 63 for more details of the uncoupler controller.
I’ve love to see this in operation. How about a full diagram of the entire layout? There is the extension snd ‘old’ or existing layout. I’d love to see how they connect. This is a phenomenal project too. Is this 20-25 years of work from the first track price laid?
Hello Mark, We are trying to find a way to put this up on a web site and make it interactive. That will come but it's not the short term priority. Bear with us.
Great update video!! I like the attention to detail, such as the facsia panels, the painted legs to obscure hades and many many other details. I'm glad to see you got the casettes to finish Chateaux Doncaster. I've read the other comments today, just wondering if you have plans to make it open to visit, I dont live very near but often come back to visit the family on the South Coast. My father was at one time involved in the Tendring Hundreds layout in Stubbington which was similar in being an operational layout but in O gauge clockwork!! Great video work from Charlie, as always!! Good luck from Spain!!
Great stuff as always - some very good progress. Some questions that came to mind as I watched: If you are re-doing your control panel for Sheffield, have you considered using a touch screen approach? I understand why you have made extensive use of LocoNet, but I was wondering if you were starting this whole thing today would you use some kind of IP + DCC based system instead? For monitoring Hades I would have thought that remotely controllable rotate tilt and zoom cameras would be very useful. Are such things in the plan? Great work - and kudos to Charlie for the video making and editing,
@@dattouk eNtry eXit routing: standard in modern signal boxes. One button (or mouse click) for the start of the route and one for the end, just as you are now implementing, if I have understood correctly.
I enjoyed that although to be honest, I am not sure I could comprehend all the ‘techie’ stuff. Clever no doubt. The beauty of our hobby is the wide variety of topics that people can immerse themselves in. Well done. Now let’s see some trains running!
Absolutely fascinating and stunning. I'm quite envious. What are the specifics of the computer to run all this? Also, what is the total length of tracks (apart from mind boggling)? Thanks for sharing and look forward to see trains running.
The database runs on a mac mini. The TrainController runs on a reasonable desktop PC - of which the graphics cards are the most expensive items. The system is not as computer intensive as it might look.
Vis a vis, previous employment, I always considered 6500k a step too far. Maybe my initial reaction would change with time, but ‘daylight’ (if that’s what it was) in all situations, had some serious cons. However, I was to discover that 5000k is referred to, by photographers, as ‘daylight at mid day’. 4000k is where it has settled for domestic, school, and office. 5000k is as far as I’d go, and it’s frustrating that this temp, though available, can rarely be bought off the shelf, and few people are even aware of it. Manufacture competition driven, but that’s another story.
@@dattouk Most likely the ip cams are outputting RSTP, you can ingest the RTSP streams from the cameras into something like NGINX as your video proxy streaming server. To record and stream those feeds you can then use OBS streaming software and ingest the RTMP streams from NGINX and stream to the web or saved to disk too. There is a bit more involved than just plug and play but I am sure you have the right crew with the right skills to get that working. I would be happy to give more details on the subject too, just let me know.
Hi Dave. With the massive hike in electricity prices, goodness knows what size your bill will be once your layout is fully up and running. I'm wondering if your nearest sub-station will overheat and explode, thus causing the company to send you an invoice for damages that even Elon Musk would find it hard to cover. Paul. 🤔
As it is just 12v (give or take 5v and DC/AC) there isn't a great deal of power consumption. In simple terms the layout consumes about 2kWh - That £0.60 per hour at todays prices. In the grand scheme of things it is cheaper than driving a car operationally.
When I was a lad in the 1950s it was just a simple mater of wiring the power control unit to the track and running the trains.Now it's getting too complicated.computer controling trains.so complicated. I have a saying for people like this."Keep it simple stupid!"
Hrmm bit more impressive than my humble layout seen on RUclips. It’s Interesting you mention an iPhone. What about the rest of the world. I always though someone should come up with an idea …. Like WAPPLES you know for windows based pc’s and apple computer and fuze those marvellous things together as one. Well it’s nice to dream. What’s the primary funding for this layout. ? I did a video on budgeting and always keen to know the hard fiscal engineering thy goes into these labours of love. Nice lights. I did a recent video covering this exact thing so went with a custome solution that can be tailored from 2500-6700k. So you can mimick specific moments in the day but I guess when doing an actual shoot you setup lighting & Create shadows as necessary. Still I’m not appearing in any upcoming railway periodicals anytime seen a smeg head like me just has to enjoy the micro moments I get in my busy life to enjoy the zen of what is my humble model railway down here in Australia where they sent all the convicts. Ha ha ha. Back to the shackles.
It stays here - its too big to move. Operations is the goal. Having 10 to 20 people having an enjoyable day - Healthy banter. Frazzled brains and well behaved rolling stock... Plenty of tea and biscuits to sooth. That is the first mountain.
This is surely testing the limits of DCC? For a protocol designed in the 1980s & first implemented in the early 1990s - back when the fastest PCs were DX2-66s (running at 66MHz, not GHz) with maybe 16 or (if you were swish) 32MB of RAM (again - not gigabytes...), it's done well - but surely the time has come to replace it with something wireless, relegating the track to purely power supply.
Another great video with loads of interesting updates however you are going to get yourself in trouble with some as I'm sure you well know you didn't have any running trains, tut-tut
I know.. I have started to dread opening the comments and having to explain the cart and the horse analogy. We should be able to make the viewers happy campers in 2023 though.
No David, I meant a lag between a train movement and what appears on the screen. I guess your equipment is a bit more sophisticated than mine which is a cheap cctv camera linked via wi-fi to an iPad.
@@barryjohnson2901 The honest answer is I have never seen a lag, which doesn't meant it's seamless though. We are using IP cameras. The existing HikVision server gets overloaded with 16 channels, but that will be relegated once we figure how to get the SVG panels up linked to Loconet and video feeds. We'll show things once we have cracked it and I will keep an eye on things.
Love it ~ fantastic effort by all involved. Just don't upgrade to TrainController V10.0 ~ if you do, the entrire effort will be wasted. The TC Stick has worked for the last 10 years ~ it will work for another Ten.. If it's connected to the internet Freiwald will download your TC file and write back and modify it. Keep the layout fully isolated from the internet. Also, hackers will get in and corrupt everything. It's NOT Rocket Science!! Get some DT602 Super Throttles ~ they are really really good. The DT402/502 have really bad buttons.
We are sticking with TC 9 for 12 months.. I haven't looked at the upgrade. Its too early and I want a stable world. To be honest TC has been a very stable product over 17 years. It does what it says it will do very well. Mr. freiwald has always been fair and reasonable with us.
Be great if you could stream the cameras online so we could watch the operation of the layout and see the trains running.
One day martin... One day.
With such a large layout, with multiple points of interest and so many cameras, there would need to be some kind of live producer. That person would need to switch different cameras to the web feed according to where things were most interesting at that moment. Streaming the thumbnails screen which David showed on this video would be possible, but would probably not make good viewing once it had been through streaming compression.
No doubt several viewers have no knowledge of the topics you describe, me being one of them, but I find it fascinating watching and try to comprehend. In all the misery we are currently experiencing it is nice to see you looking so contented. Well done David and the team. Cheers, Bob
You need to come down soon if you are based near the south coast - See it for yourself.
Simply mindblowing. All credit to everyone at McKinley, the work you do is so impressive. I hate to think how much it all costs!
I have been following McKinley from the first video in 09. What an awesome layout. It has inspired me over the years as I have been building my layout.
Thats the attitude Steve... Good luck.
I was wondering if you would link up with Hans from IoTT one day. Would like to see some more about use of the database and interfaces, MQTT and so on. This opens up a whole realm of linked automation (including layout lighting, for instance).
Great Work and a great Project! Cheers from a German fellow- modelrailroader with a mich smaller Layout.😉
Great Video I love it 💕💕💕💕💕💕
Thanks you sharing great video on your layout
Great watching every time
From Australia
Fabulous updates and, as always at McKinley, a very high level of detail and attention to the peripherals such as lighting and cameras. Brilliant stuff
What you have been achieving with the technical and IT side fascinates me. I had a similar issue with video cameras on my layout (a fraction of the size of McKinley) but what I did was take the video outputs from the cameras into a secondhand Extron video matrix and then used Traincontroller to switch the video matrix as a train progresses through blocks along the line. I had to build a DCC to RS232 converter to control the matrix but it works well. Basically it means that I can automatically follow a train on a video monitor. Hope that may be of interest.
I love it...its just too beyond my tiny brain to think i could get my head around working this huge piece of magnificence.
David, Being a bear of little brain this is all above my pay level. But now you are finally here I think McKinley is going to be a lot of fun to operate. I bet the team and yourself can't wait to get started. If you wanted to could you run a train by yourself just for fun. Not part of the timetable? Still it's all starting to come to the boil. David, thank you for your time. Cheers, Chris Perry.
A mug of tea and a McKinley Railway update, happy days.
Absolutely brilliant planing and foresight going into the operational requirements of such an extensive layout. Great stuff to see!
Absoloutely outstanding, 13 years ago it was mighty impressive and to see the expansion coming to the point of some running sessions is beyond exciting.
This is great and we will be soon seeing trains in action. Can't wait for the next update with the operating procedures and your team actually running trains
Thats the scary bit... I just hope the ops team have patience when we find out what we didn't do right... Upwards to infinity.
Once again, this is fantastic. I'd hate to think what the final price will be. It will be great to see operating sessions up and running, even without complete scenery. Speaking of which, have you got room to create a static rail museum in your scenery, like our real life Newport Railway Museum in Melbourne, where very old extremely weathered locos (or restored old engines) are pushed away into a couple of cramped old rail sidings, where people can visit and climb over the old engines. Or, as time progresses on your railway, you could have an occasionally well presented excursion train. When did old excursion trains all polished up become a thing? Oh well. You couldn't possibilty do all the things that people think of, but it is fun thinking of them. Once again, great to get every update. If looks fantastic.
Fantastic stuff as always. Thanks for the inspiration. Martin
Two thousand I/O and that’s before you add all the engine decoders you have to talk to, that’s one whopping machine and control process - many automated factories will be well short of that. Great to see it all coming together and also your pleasure in what you have all achieved. Model train engineering and automation at its best. Best regards Stephen
Thanks Stephen... Its been a mission.
Sophisticated ! there is steam coming out of my ears 😮
Very interesting, David. Great to see all the progress you and your team are making. My mind did glaze over after 9:30 though...
You did well Peter... Would it have helped if I had a couple of moving trains at 8.45?
I'd love to see more in-depth videos on your custom program that runs everything and on your digitrax setup one day.
Hi Allan, I think it would bore most people. We'd love to share, but I am struggling to find the right medium to do it.
What model are the buttons that are green on the facia. They look like the have a clock face in them?
The push buttons were sourced from AliExpress, the T-Button Switches store.
We used a 19mm metal momentary push button with a green 12V LED. The push button interfaces to the micro controller which runs the green LED at 5V giving acceptable brightness. The "arrow" in the push button can be aligned to point towards the uncoupler. See Episode 63 for more details of the uncoupler controller.
@@ianhart8364 ah! I thought it had a clock display . Now it get it. So a chevron or carat pointer
I’ve love to see this in operation. How about a full diagram of the entire layout? There is the extension snd ‘old’ or existing layout. I’d love to see how they connect. This is a phenomenal project too. Is this 20-25 years of work from the first track price laid?
Hello Mark, We are trying to find a way to put this up on a web site and make it interactive. That will come but it's not the short term priority. Bear with us.
Great update video!! I like the attention to detail, such as the facsia panels, the painted legs to obscure hades and many many other details. I'm glad to see you got the casettes to finish Chateaux Doncaster.
I've read the other comments today, just wondering if you have plans to make it open to visit, I dont live very near but often come back to visit the family on the South Coast. My father was at one time involved in the Tendring Hundreds layout in Stubbington which was similar in being an operational layout but in O gauge clockwork!!
Great video work from Charlie, as always!!
Good luck from Spain!!
Great stuff as always - some very good progress. Some questions that came to mind as I watched:
If you are re-doing your control panel for Sheffield, have you considered using a touch screen approach?
I understand why you have made extensive use of LocoNet, but I was wondering if you were starting this whole thing today would you use some kind of IP + DCC based system instead?
For monitoring Hades I would have thought that remotely controllable rotate tilt and zoom cameras would be very useful. Are such things in the plan?
Great work - and kudos to Charlie for the video making and editing,
Ahh! You have gone over to NX routing! Excellent.
Well James, you've got me there! NX routing??? Thats a new acronym for me..
@@dattouk eNtry eXit routing: standard in modern signal boxes. One button (or mouse click) for the start of the route and one for the end, just as you are now implementing, if I have understood correctly.
@@JamesPetts Yep. I'll add this ditty to my lexicon.
I enjoyed that although to be honest, I am not sure I could comprehend all the ‘techie’ stuff. Clever no doubt.
The beauty of our hobby is the wide variety of topics that people can immerse themselves in.
Well done. Now let’s see some trains running!
Absolutely fascinating and stunning. I'm quite envious. What are the specifics of the computer to run all this? Also, what is the total length of tracks (apart from mind boggling)? Thanks for sharing and look forward to see trains running.
The database runs on a mac mini. The TrainController runs on a reasonable desktop PC - of which the graphics cards are the most expensive items. The system is not as computer intensive as it might look.
Love the videos
No scenic for 6 months plus for testing. On a humerus note I’m wondering if your getting scared of finishing ? Haha
That made me laugh. God no... We have to get out of this phase. Operations is what I want.
Vis a vis, previous employment, I always considered 6500k a step too far. Maybe my initial reaction would change with time, but ‘daylight’ (if that’s what it was) in all situations, had some serious cons. However, I was to discover that 5000k is referred to, by photographers, as ‘daylight at mid day’. 4000k is where it has settled for domestic, school, and office. 5000k is as far as I’d go, and it’s frustrating that this temp, though available, can rarely be bought off the shelf, and few people are even aware of it. Manufacture competition driven, but that’s another story.
I take it you approve of our choice. Out of interest, I have never seen a 500K bulb. We now have 50 spare 300K GU10s if anyone wants some 🙂
Incredible. It is such a large engineering project. What is your drive you to create such a project?
As you have the operator cameras, any desire to film live webstreams of running sessions? Great project. Thanks for the updates
In time... yes. Just need to figure out how we do it (but not now).
@@dattouk Most likely the ip cams are outputting RSTP, you can ingest the RTSP streams from the cameras into something like NGINX as your video proxy streaming server. To record and stream those feeds you can then use OBS streaming software and ingest the RTMP streams from NGINX and stream to the web or saved to disk too. There is a bit more involved than just plug and play but I am sure you have the right crew with the right skills to get that working. I would be happy to give more details on the subject too, just let me know.
That's a new use for FileMaker - it's been a while since I've seen anyone use it!
There you go... I couldn't find anything else that was cross platform and relatively well supported.
Absolutely amazing. Now you have Halifax and Hades will there be a Hull to complete the 'Ull, 'Ell and 'Alifax trio?
Sorry Attus - No more stations or yards... We have maxed out the whole floor.!
Hi Dave.
With the massive hike in electricity prices, goodness knows what size your bill will be once your layout is fully up and running. I'm wondering if your nearest sub-station will overheat and explode, thus causing the company to send you an invoice for damages that even Elon Musk would find it hard to cover.
Paul. 🤔
As it is just 12v (give or take 5v and DC/AC) there isn't a great deal of power consumption. In simple terms the layout consumes about 2kWh - That £0.60 per hour at todays prices. In the grand scheme of things it is cheaper than driving a car operationally.
When I was a lad in the 1950s it was just a simple mater of wiring the power control unit to the track and running the trains.Now it's getting too complicated.computer controling trains.so complicated. I have a saying for people like this."Keep it simple stupid!"
Hrmm bit more impressive than my humble layout seen on RUclips. It’s Interesting you mention an iPhone. What about the rest of the world. I always though someone should come up with an idea …. Like WAPPLES you know for windows based pc’s and apple computer and fuze those marvellous things together as one. Well it’s nice to dream. What’s the primary funding for this layout. ? I did a video on budgeting and always keen to know the hard fiscal engineering thy goes into these labours of love. Nice lights. I did a recent video covering this exact thing so went with a custome solution that can be tailored from 2500-6700k. So you can mimick specific moments in the day but I guess when doing an actual shoot you setup lighting & Create shadows as necessary. Still I’m not appearing in any upcoming railway periodicals anytime seen a smeg head like me just has to enjoy the micro moments I get in my busy life to enjoy the zen of what is my humble model railway down here in Australia where they sent all the convicts. Ha ha ha. Back to the shackles.
I really hope once you've completed this monster task that you share tons of ops sessions and day-in-the-life of... (the various roles).
We will Jade... It might take us a year or two to perfect it though.
@@dattouk I follow eagerly!
Wonder how it is funded.
McKinley is a wonderful creation and a credit to your team, but what are your long term aspirations David, will it remain in its current location?
It stays here - its too big to move. Operations is the goal. Having 10 to 20 people having an enjoyable day - Healthy banter. Frazzled brains and well behaved rolling stock... Plenty of tea and biscuits to sooth. That is the first mountain.
Where can I buy the chocolate brown paint. Lovely . Thank you if you can share this please
We got it at Homebase
It is amazing! How in the world could you afford all this, add to that the 2022 energy price rise, can you afford to run it?
Thank you bob. If you are based anywhere near the south coast you should come along soon.
There's a book or two with videos and exams in project management in all this
Hey Stephen we are looking for help on the documentation and training...😀
This is surely testing the limits of DCC? For a protocol designed in the 1980s & first implemented in the early 1990s - back when the fastest PCs were DX2-66s (running at 66MHz, not GHz) with maybe 16 or (if you were swish) 32MB of RAM (again - not gigabytes...), it's done well - but surely the time has come to replace it with something wireless, relegating the track to purely power supply.
It doesn't appear to be the constraining factor going forward. The real technical bug bear is and will be the engineering quality of the models.
Another great video with loads of interesting updates however you are going to get yourself in trouble with some as I'm sure you well know you didn't have any running trains, tut-tut
I know.. I have started to dread opening the comments and having to explain the cart and the horse analogy. We should be able to make the viewers happy campers in 2023 though.
🫣
I'll just check all that with NASA.........!
When will the two parts be connected?
Once we have upgraded the old room and refurbished 2 of the three stations - London and Manchester. We can run them as one layout today
Is there much of a time lag with the cameras?
You'd have to ask Dr. Who. Do you mean between filming and showing...
No David, I meant a lag between a train movement and what appears on the screen. I guess your equipment is a bit more sophisticated than mine which is a cheap cctv camera linked via wi-fi to an iPad.
@@barryjohnson2901 The honest answer is I have never seen a lag, which doesn't meant it's seamless though. We are using IP cameras. The existing HikVision server gets overloaded with 16 channels, but that will be relegated once we figure how to get the SVG panels up linked to Loconet and video feeds. We'll show things once we have cracked it and I will keep an eye on things.
Love it ~ fantastic effort by all involved. Just don't upgrade to TrainController V10.0 ~ if you do, the entrire effort will be wasted. The TC Stick has worked for the last 10 years ~ it will work for another Ten.. If it's connected to the internet Freiwald will download your TC file and write back and modify it. Keep the layout fully isolated from the internet. Also, hackers will get in and corrupt everything. It's NOT Rocket Science!! Get some DT602 Super Throttles ~ they are really really good. The DT402/502 have really bad buttons.
We are sticking with TC 9 for 12 months.. I haven't looked at the upgrade. Its too early and I want a stable world. To be honest TC has been a very stable product over 17 years. It does what it says it will do very well. Mr. freiwald has always been fair and reasonable with us.
This is a great layout looking really good. May i ask how all this is financed?
Nope... You can't ask things like that. A lady's weight and age. A mans obsession with his hobby. You just have to use your imagination.
I missed being first view buy 16 seconds. I was fourth. Boy four people in front of me.
Goodness Mark... I expect better from such a loyal supporter... 😍😍
@@dattouk I agree, if you can’t depend on fan boys who can you count on? No one!
I appreciate that these things are terribly important, but this video is terribly boring!
We are focused on different things at present. The entertaining part with trains moving will come in a year or so.