Greenwich couplings her

[Craig Deery-Taylor]

Perhaps we should wait and see what Craig Deery-Taylor comes up with before bashing the idea.
It sounds good to me, so lets wait and see how he gets on with it.

I use Egger/bemo type couplings with ramps.
However I have opperated several layouts with fixed rare earth magnets and others with electro magnets, both had problems.
I have also used a layout that had retractable rare earth type magnets, these were manualy opperated and that worked very well indeed.

Brian Meldon

I'll be posting the technical bits this Sunday, been very busy recently. Hope you are all keeping safe out there.

[Craig Deery-Taylor]

Good afternoon!!

So here we have the wee system. Using a MERG kit (servo tester), I can control the range of the magnet from the decoupling zone. It's not a permanent fix in as yet, but I'd suggest plastic cable tie holders and a cable tie to keep the servo in place.

Exoxy resin to keep the magnet fixed to the servo arm will also be best. I ran superglue as a rough demo fix, the magnet to attracted to the screw holding the servo arm on  ;D

I'll try and get a video sorted later but suffice to say, the trial run worked flawlessly, and the time from stopping to decoupling would almost seem prototypical.

The kit i'll be using for this system will be the MERG EZpoints kit, this allows for much easier push button operation, and the ability to set a speed and range of the servo arms throw.

Hope this helps your endeavours in decoupling.

[Graeme Dunbar]

That's looking good! A friend uses a similar method to move stop magnets on his Faller road system layout (raising and lowering a magnet below the road surface to activate the reed switch in the road vehicles). I understand the commercial item is an electromagnet similar to an uncoupling magnet and he found his method more convenient and controllable.

[Craig Deery-Taylor]

That's looking good! A friend uses a similar method to move stop magnets on his Faller road system layout (raising and lowering a magnet below the road surface to activate the reed switch in the road vehicles). I understand the commercial item is an electromagnet similar to an uncoupling magnet and he found his method more convenient and controllable.

It certainly is less of a sudden shock/thunk as it were.

[B.Meldon]

That looks like a great system Craig.
The larger more powerful magnet will help a lot with the effective range as well.
As I have mentioned before I have used a layout where the magnets were moved into place using a manual operated system. (Wire in tube etc.) This avoided all the unwanted uncoupling and attracting of steel axles etc. that is common on layouts with fixed magnets but was very effective at uncoupling.
I have no doubt your one will work the same. That is provided you do not get any interference in the servo control system from the locos. (Not that I know much about that, as I have never used them, but I do know that some servo type control systems suffer from chattering caused by interference from the motors in the locos moving above.)

[Graeme Dunbar]

Servos can "glitch" a bit in use but they are well suited to an application like this. Not much harm is likely to come to the overall mechanism if the servo did twitch. The result might not be quite as happy if the servo was connected to a delicate mechanism  such as a semaphore signal without some form of strain relief or clutch.

I am trying to remember if my friend moved the magnets vertically or horizontally on his Faller road layout. If the distance between the magnet and coupling can be set by some other means the servo arm could move the magnet horizontally out of the  line of the track.  The lever arm could be quite long and the magnet quite heavy then, as the torque needed to move horizontally is small.  Come to think of it, it might even be possible to have one magnet and one servo uncoupling on adjacent tracks  as the magnet could be moved under one track or the other or parked in between them.

[Craig Deery-Taylor]

I noticed chatter with the first servo, I swapped it for another and the chatter stopped.

And as the servo system is run from a separate supply altogether, and the servos internals are binary operated, just uses a 5v signal from the circuit board, no worries on loco interference  :)

All happy days, even in these, trying times  ;)