Following a trip to see the excellent McKinley Railway, and a conversation about the RFID projects I had done before I have started another project - just what I need, one more thing to add to the list.

What I am looking at is something that can read the train id and feed it back to the computer that is running the layout, however there is more to this than just reading the RFID data. The RFID readers I have used can not be placed close together, they interfere with each other.

So I need a solution to this problem, and also I need to add extra information about direction. The idea is to add pair of optical readers either side of the RFID, the one that triggers first can be used to determine the direction of motion of the train, this then switches on the RFID reader - it is normally off to prevent interference.

This reads the train ID, then the second optical will trigger.

At this point we know what train we have, what direction it is moving in and how long it took to move between two fixed points.

Add a second tag to the opposite end of the loco, and we can tell if the loco is running tender first or boiler first.

Further to that add a tag to the first and last vehicle of each rake, and you can tell which rake the loco is pulling and if the rake is complete or has been separated. Just about everything you might desire to know about a train on the layout.

Location, direction, loco id, loco orientation, speed, train id and the train is complete

The problem then is to send all this data back to the operator/computer.

This one could take a while to sort out....