The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall Museum Model Railroad and I maintain a separate tech blog for all my electronics & software not directly related to Randall.
2025-12-07 - Track Cam Monitor, Completed
Category RandallI finally finished the last phase of the Track Cam Monitor project: the 3rd camera is now installed and configured to show all the back-of-the-mountain trains on the tablet display!
Track Cam Monitor (a.k.a. TCM) is a project I started last year: the goal of this project is to monitor a train staging yard with remote tracks out of sight. The "kiosk mode" Android application displays feeds from RTSP cameras.
In the case of Randall, the purpose is to display the tracks which are not visible on the “other side of the mountain”. When the Saturday Operators stand by the main Valley control panel, they can’t see the tracks on the other side of the room. The tablet project views from 3 cameras in a concise display conveniently located next to the main control panel:
The cameras installed are Tapo C110 cameras. They are excellent for this purpose -- very small footprint, very lightweight to install, and at a very attractive low price. Here’s the latest one that I installed on the top of the window -- it captures the view of the Summit tracks at the top and the Napa tracks going towards the Sultan tunnel at the bottom level:
All the cameras are mounted sideways to take advantage of their larger horizontal field of view. In the Track Cam Monitor software, I added the ability to rotate the image as well as zoom and pan. TCM grabs the RTSP video feed directly off the camera over wifi -- no wires needed -- and it automatically handles reconnections if the stream is interrupted.