Week 3

This week's work proved to be a bit of a challenge. As our project this year relies on the efforts of previous years, we have to take their designs and efforts into consideration.  While it has been easy enough to read their final reports, it has been a challenge to find all the SolidWorks files that we need to continue this project.

Last year's full scale track team originally aimed to design the curved portion of the track in the Fall, that we are now working on, but seem to have completely changed their focus by the end of the Spring semester to designing a better support structure for the track to improve rigidity. So while I had no problem finding their final support structure design files, it was much more difficult to find the various files for the track itself. This problem was compounded by the number of different folders with various SolidWorks files contained in their team folder. Many of these folder held duplicate files, making it confusing to sort through, with no solid naming structure to their directory. To top it off, many of their files have reference errors due to files that were called to from personal computer directories.

Once I was able to find the relevant files on the drive, and sort them into a new folder for our team's use this year I was able to start working on preliminary modeling of our junction. With the way the rails are designed, they are mirrors of one another, but the rails themselves are not symmetrical. This made it necessary to create separate files for the left and right sides of the track for the straight and curved portions.
Right and Left track cutaways.
Figuring out which combination of tracks necessary to make the junction took a little sketch to wrap my head around it. Basically if the train is going to the right, the junction needs to keep the straight portion of the right track, and connect it to a curved left section. For the current model I used a 15m radius for the bend, but future decisions will affect that radius. I think a turn radius equal to two lane widths is probably a good choice for most roads, and with road widths in the range from 2.5 to 3.7 meters, a turn radius around 7 meters will probably be a good selection, but this will also be dependent on what the bogie's minimum requirements are.
Drawing used to figure out the correct combination of straight and curved track for a junction turning towards the right.

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