The Saint Canard Midland Train Cam: a Loco with a View!

Back in 2006 I made the most incredible ebay find: a brand-new wireless color VGA mini-cam. It’s basically the ugly guts of a webcam fused to a 1.2 GHz transmitter; the kit includes a wireless A/V receiver, AC power supplies for both the receiver and camera/transmitter, and a DC (9v) battery harness to make the camera portable. All for $15 on a Sunday-morning snipe! Even with shipping charges from Canada, it’s still a heckuva deal you’ll never find at Best Buy or Radio Shack!

To top it off, the image quality was quite decent for its time – at full VGA (640x480) resolution with vivid color, it surpasses EP VHS tapes in addition to most PC webcams and cellphones. My only gripe with the kit is its limitations on battery usage: the range is only about 30 feet (compared to at least twice that with the AC adapter), and battery life sucks - bad.

Now, while the possibilities for such apparati are endless, I really only had one thing in mind when I bought it:

After test-fitting the components in a full-width “carbody” locomotive, I decided I could fit them into a more modern "road-switcher" loco. So, I dug up one of Life-Like’s outdated HO-scale EMD GP38-2’s and gutted it - no big loss. Only then did I realize my folly: Achieving a prototypical engineer’s perspective (on the right side of the cab) required centering the lens in the rightmost window, but despite its diminutive size, the camera was of course still too large!












So, I compromised and settled on the right center cab window; even then, I still had to hack apart the camera’s housing (risking damage to the CMOS and other innards), trim it to fit, then reassemble and re-seal it to prvent light leaks and hold the works together. The worst thing about this is the focus depth is no longer adjustable without removing the cam - which is glued to the roof of the cab.


















In the process of doing this, I resoldered the antenna to the transmitter board, offering more flexibility so I could poke it through a hole where the locomotive’s Dynamic Brake cooling fan used to be. I also hacked the harnesses to bits so I could fit the wiring and battery within the confines of the locomotive body shell.














The locomotive's frame was modified as well. Since the camera is powered by a single 9V battery, I had to remove bits of the frame so it would fit securely and provide tracking weight over the rear wheels. Removing the shell to unplug the battery quickly became a pain in the ass, so I installed a salvage SPST (single-pole-single-throw) switch in the fuel tank to eliminate this tomfoolery. I hacked the bolsters on the rear truck to allow it to swivel freely for easy access to this switch.
















After connecting the radio A/V receiver to my computer’s TV tuner, my new cam engine was ready to inspect the layout with assistance from a powered unit. This locomotive isn't much to look at, but I didn't want to sacrifice a proper model to an unproven project idea. The five-second airbrush job makes it look like the railroad doesn't give a crap either ;)












This could be a disaster in the making - passengers on the Chessie Steam Special might get more than they bargained for! It seems I may have degraded the signal somewhat when I removed the antenna... but for some reason, a lot of the noise in the pic is from the WinTV card I was using to capture these images on a PC. When connected directly to a TV, the noise is much less.


















Heading under County Road 43 in St. Canard... I purposely wanted a bit of the locomotive's hood to be visible, but it turns out the depth-of-field isn't conducive to this idea, as it blurs too much. Still it’s pretty neat to get a “model’s eye” view of your creations, to peek inside the alternate universe you’ve created! And from the true engineer's seat, no less...!

I’m not the first one to cram a camera into an HO model train (indeed, Lionel once sold a ready-made HO set in the 1980’s - at $250 for Black & White!), and there are a few glitches I need to work out (signal quality has decreased; need to see if I can power the cam from an upgraded constant-voltage track circuit). Still, for less than $50 all told from camera kit to locomotive, this was an inexpensive, creative, simple, amusing and fun “proof-of-concept” endeavor.

It would also make a great spy-cam... mwuhahaha.