I've toyed with the idea of building a working pike in my classroom since I started teaching about six years ago (I'm 58, I've had several other careers). A lot of it has been a selfish desire to increase my own opportunities to enjoy model railroading, so I've been cautious about making sure the academic value was appropriate. 

The particular nature of the school I'm teaching at now, the middle school math curriculum in general, and the particular circumstances of my room came together this year enough to give it a try. But I needed to be sure a model train would be interesting for the students.

So I spent my last winter break building a very bare bones Inglenook. Most of you are familiar with this classic puzzle layout I'm sure. If not:

http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/sw-inglenook.html

Here's a picture of students learning to use it.

I don't have much experience with DCC but I understand it well enough to know that there are entire domains of knowledge and fun that electronic controls enable. Years ago when Bruce Chubb first published his C/MRI interface in Model Railroader I was fascinated. His thorough explanations of the circuits and the logic were so good that even I, pretty much an electronics novice, could follow them in detail. 

For now though, all I wanted was the ability to impose momentum effects on the students' engine handling experience, and to provide a semblance of prototypical sounds to help them immerse themselves in the simulation of heavy train movements. I bought a Digitrax Zephyr. 

I happened to still have a dozen or so Walthers Shinohara code 83 turnouts and some flextrack from my last layout, taken down about 18 years ago. The switches aren't "DCC friendly" but Allan Gartner's amazing site helped me adapt them:

http://www.wiringfordcc.com/switches.htm

Those are Caboose Industries ground throws with switch rod extensions in brass tubing sunk into the Homosote base. The track bumpers are Tomar Industries Hayes type. Other than the rolling stock that's it for commercial components (other than suitcase connectors, stereo plug sockets, and other electrical odds and ends underneath).

I bought eight brand new Walthers Mainline freight cars and a USRA 0-8-0 with Tsunami sound, all totally RTR and reasonably well detailed. I've got some other older equipment but I wanted robust, totally compatible mechanicals that could take a bit of rough handling.

I picked colorful freight cars that were mostly distinctively different from each other, but with a few boxcars that you needed to look at somewhat carefully to tell one from the other. Learning the switching puzzle is easiest when you can tell cars apart at a glance, but I wanted students to begin sharpening their eyes for detail.

I didn't give too much attention to roadnames or even era in picking rolling stock. Both of those things are important to a model railroad, but this is more of a litmus test than a model. Would the kids be more interested in historical equipment or things they can see today? I wanted to find out.

I had an old piece of particle board to laminate the Homosote to, and I screwed some scrap pieces of old oak flooring around the edges as trim (these oak strips also serve to stiffen the particle board/Homosote sandwich). The entire unit is portable but the particle board weighs a ton and I'll be wary of using it again for much of anything.

I'll describe how I introduced it to the students and how we ran it in my next post.

Jeff