Watch our Transitional Ops session live on Youtube. We will have multiple remote operators and a socially-distanced skeleton crew in the layout room tonight.

Stream starts around 7:45PDT and trains should start rolling shortly after.

Hi everyone!

With the ongoing work and success around our camera cars, as well as interest from our presentations, we’ve decided to take our Fall Open House virtual! On November 14, 2020, you’ll be able to take a train for a spin around our lower level loop at SVL, all from the comfort of your home!

Trains will be available from 10am – 3pm Pacific Standard Time. If you are interested in running a train, please sign up via the survey here. Note we are asking for an email and a preferred time slot so we can invite you to a Google Meet to coordinate with you when we start running trains. Tips and tricks for remote engineers can be found here.

If you prefer to just watch, click through to the live-stream of the Open House on Youtube.

Note: As mentioned above – this is a remote Open House. Our layout is still closed to the general public due to Covid-19 restrictions. Only a limited number of members will be allowed into the building to help monitor trains, so please do not come down to the club.

Silicon Valley Lines was featured in two presentations on Remote Operations.

Saturday, September 26th at 9:00am PDT, John Abatecola from TSG multimedia released a new segment in his Model Railroading 101 series covering remote operations at Silicon Valley Lines. This video gives you some insight into how we adjusted our operations scheme to accommodate remote operators while maintaining social distancing rules at the club. We show and explain the technology we’re using to pull this all together, as well as give a glimpse into what a remote ops session looks like.

The same day (September 26th), at 3:00pm PDT, Bernhard and Dave gave a NMRAx presentation about”Remote Operations at Silicon Valley Lines”. This presentation goes deeper into the background and the technology of remote operations. We explain hardware and software setup in detail, and talk about our experience in fine-tuning operations with remote operators.

In preparation for the NMRA convention next year, well-known railroad photographer Dan Munson visited several Bay Area layouts this weekend, including Silicon Valley Lines. Dan, with help from Doug Good, spent several hours with us this morning photographing the layout.

Even with COVID-19 raging in the Bay Area, over the last few months several club members had worked socially distanced on expanding and finishing scenes to put our best foot forward. The layout looked great and the effort was well worth it.

We’re very much looking forward to the results from today’s photo shoot.

Tonight was the ops session we have been planning for the last few weeks. Since we are in the middle of a global pandemic, we decided to severely limit on-site attendance, institute social distancing, wearing masks, and try out remote participation.

Instead of the usual 10 – 15 session participants in the layout room, we had only four: A yardmaster for Nowheres, and three engineers. Plus one member for taking care of cameras, Internet, and streaming stuff. We also had three club members joining us remotely as engineers, and a remote dispatcher.

Remote control of our web-based layout panels and locomotives on the layout is easily accomplished using a VPN application that connects remote devices to the club network. EngineDriver’s automatic discovery of JMRI’s Withrottle Server doesn’t work over the VPN connection. Instead, remote participants need to enter IP and port number of the computer running JMRI manually. In our case 192.168.8.10, port 12090. The control and dispatcher web panels are available at http://192.168.8.10:3000 over the VPN connection as well.

Over the course of the afternoon we installed cameras in the layout room. We used Foscam X1 security cameras, as well as old Android phones with the IP Webcam app. All four cameras were streaming video into OBS.

The four cameras were set up to cover as much of the layout room as we could pull off. The intent was to give remote operators maximum visibility of the main line, so that they get to see the trains they are running.

We also streamed from OBS to Youtube Live for some time during the session. Using the Present from window Google Meet feature worked for the video stream, but resulted in unacceptable latency for remote participants. We will need to try this again with the OBS VirtualCam plugin.

On the left is the FRS Radio / Meet gateway. This old Dell laptop runs Linux and has separate microphone and head set plugs, with microphones taped to computer and headset speakers. The laptop in the middle runs OBS and acts as the hub for all the video streams, including broadcasting to Meet and Youtube Live. The laptop on the right was the control for the Youtube Live stream.

This was another step towards restarting operations at Silicon Valley Lines. Operations sessions as we know them will not be possible for a while. Some remote participation component will be needed for the time being.

The club Internet connection has 24 MBit/s downlink and 5 MBit/s uplink. We found that throughput on the uplink was very variable, and stopped the Youtube Live stream halfway through the session after downgrading quality multiple times to free up more bandwidth for Google Meet. That definitely resulted in improved video and audio quality with less artifacts.

IP Webcam did not work reliably on some phones, while it worked just fine on another phone.

Finally, we need to build a more compelling remote engineer experience. While the camera setup we used allows for an ok overview of the layout room, it very much has a security camera feel to it. We will try to make it more reliable, but even then it’s at best nice as a novelty.

What we really want to do is to put the remote engineer in the middle of the action. If you can’t be there, maybe with technology we can provide an experience that is not possible when standing in the layout room.

Stay tuned.