Moving cars!
June 15th, 2005 by RoscoHeadOK this isn’t new apparently, but I’ve never seen it done in LEGO before so it’s new to me 😉
The idea is to motorise vehicles on a town layout. The method has been pinched from model railroading, where this seems to be reasonably common. Basically, you stick a battery and motor in the vehicle, and metal wire or strips under the road around the path you want it to follow. Then you add a magnet that activates the steering, and voila!
So I’ve come up with a basic chassis, too big for a car, but should be OK for a truck or bus. I think to do a car, you’d need to use non-LEGO parts, probably commercially available internals. My chassis is all LEGO, 7 studs wide, and length is easily adjustable. Vehicle must be long enough for a battery box, plus a couple of studs for the drive and about 6 studs for the steering.
The next thing to think about is stopping at level crossings. In scale layouts this is achieved using an electromagnet under the road which activates a reed switch cutoff in the vehicle. That will be difficult with LEGO, but we may try it eventually. For now I guess they’ll just go round & round.
Anyway I’ll let you know how it goes.