Train Your Garden

WESL needs some maintenance -of-way gear, including a motorized sweeper to help clear leaves, acorns, sticks, and errant ballast from fouling the line.

The above video is the first iteration of the motor brush car. It started as an attachment made for a Dyson vacuum. The attachment wasn’t too wide, was inexpensive, and already had the major components I needed – a motor, brush, and frame that holds both.

Then I cut apart a flat car and used a piece of lexan to mount the vacuum attachment to both car ends. A spare dewalt charger was used for the battery mount, so the car will run on dewalt batteries, which are common on the WESL.

Below is the “after” shot from sweeping the line (the upper one in the photo); the car works better than anticipated! Next up: 1) mount a mini blower 2) integrate an on/off switch and potentiometer to regulate the sweep speed, and 3) paint and accessories to make this into a proper maintenance-of-way car.

Here below is the car after the shop finished kitting it out for maintenance purposes. A large fore-mounted searchlight was fitted for ease of nighttime maintenance ops, and a tool bench was installed for trackside repairs. Several storage drums are also located in the gondola. Some finishing paint work remains, but the car is largely ready for service. The yard foreman, Red, likes to ride atop the brush car to survey the yard during sweeping operations, some say this practice is unsafe and they’re probably right, but you can’t tell Red that.