Joel and Bebe
The idea of having a train came in a dream. I thought I could build one easily, I soon found out it wasn’t going to be easy! After many drawings, I set out to build the train. I bought motors, wheels, had the frame welded, built the track, then bought the gears, sprockets chains all to find out I had the wrong sizes.
I met Tobin Hill (an Engineer), he said I needed a lot of help. The idea I had would never work. I had him build it anyways and like he said, it fell apart after a few tries. He came up with the drive shaft that we’re currently using. After a while we started to have trouble with run times. The more children that went for a ride the more batteries we needed. Tobin knew Edger Hall, he came and looked over the project and came up with a solution. We went from 12 volts to 48 volts back to 12 volts. Which gave us the run time I needed so that no child was turned away because of dead batteries.
I wanted the train to go a little faster. This was a little harder than I thought. 5 motors and electronic equipment later we went a little faster. One night a Dad (Craig Wirtz) came with his children to ride the train. He said he knew a lot about 48 volt systems. He offered to help with this. He told me about motor controllers, the next today I went to the web and looked up motor controllers.
I rented a 16 foot truck and loaded 130 feet of tracks, 44 foot of train batteries and drove 1250 miles to get my current system. 7 Days later, I’m back in Texas showing Tobin and Edger the new motor. Tobin and Edger paired the new motor to the drive shaft and re-did the electrical system.
