The Track Sweeper
I have always had the brush part of this sweeper mounted on something, and ran that around the loops before running trains to brush leaves and twigs off the tracks. But I originally had the brush mounted on a flat car, pushed by a locomotive, which in turn had its battery in its tender or trailing car. That was a total of 3 items to move from track to track to clean the tracks (of which there are now six).
After a little brain storming, I came up with a design for a single unit track sweeper. The chassis is the same original flat car, but cut and bolted together with angle brackets to create an offset that provided space for the powered truck of a Shay locomotive.
Since I was pretty sure there was no real prototype for something like this, I decided to just have fun with it and 3D print some steam punk stuff to decorate it.
The brush is mounted at the front of the flat car just like it always was. There are two battery packs, one for the powered truck, and one for the brush motor.
I put a Revo wireless controller in the cab so I can remotely run the sweeper.
Two switches on the back turn on truck power and brush power independently - one switch for each battery pack.
An additional feature my original brush card did not have is a means of sounding an audible alarm if there is a rock or something in the middle of the track that was too heavy to get brushed off, but would be big enough to activate the decoupling of cars passing over. This spring loaded paddle simply has two copper contacts that close the circuit to sound an audible alarm when something pushes the paddle back. Besides detecting rocks, it does a very good job of detecting frogs in switches, so I always have to be checking to see whether the alarm was real or false.
The obstruction detection paddle rides just above rail level.
I had a spare truck from a Shay, and put it to good use here. The drive shaft doesn't connect to anything, but on the electric Shay models, the drive shaft was just for prototypical looks anyway.
I had a cab left over from another kit bashing project. Between a flat car I was willing to sacrifice, some spare parts, and some 3D printing, I came up with a remote controlled single-unit battery operated track sweeper.
