Vacuum/Blower to dust off trains

Howdy guys,
Time hasn't been on my side lately, but I took a video which shows this drive-through thing I built to get the dust off of the trains. Initially this week I just set up to run the trains through. Unfortunately, the vids didn't show dust very well before or after the train went through. On this video I put a bunch of dust from the vacuum filter ON the rolling stock to show better. You can see the train go through the tunnel with dust on the cars and come back out with the dust gone.

Here is the link to the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm7Rz_wezcI

Contrary to what has been reported, I did not have to go to the hospital after using this device on myself. It worked just fine on me. 

The vacuum hoses can pop out to be put away after use. The whole box is held on with a clamp and 2 wingnuts and can be removed from the layout easily. The placement of the box is on lower level storage tracks and this area will never have scenery.  






Here is the post from a previous thread about this thing.

I can give some background on the project.

My layout is in the basement along with a washer and dryer. That generates some dust. I can't say my wife is careful when clearing the lint screen. I also do sawing in the basement. I hang shower curtain liners for a nice enclosed work space and that helps greatly but some dust still gets out when I saw.

For preparation for the group coming over I always dust off the trains. I probably have about 150 pieces of rolling stock. 

Dusting with soft brushes was pretty much useless. Too slow, and brushing leaves streaks that are worse than fingerprints and the dust gets swept into gaps. It also spreads the dust around the room which is worse still.

From there I tried the vacuum and that was useless. I tried the vacuum with the brush attached and that was still pretty useless. It still left streaks and there are some areas that just can't be brushed.

Then I went to pulling each car off the layout, bringing it down to the floor and blowing the dust off the cars with a little stinger vacuum I got at Home Depot for free when I bought a shop vac. It worked well and the dust was removed more uniformly and not streaky. It was just a pain in the *** and dust is still flying around.

Recently I started blowing the dust off the cars with the stinger and sucking the dust from above the car with the shop vac. This led to the drive-through idea. I went out and got another shop vac. In the middle of the drive-through is where the dedicated stinger blast of air is set up. On both sides of the blowing air are the two shop vacs attachments dedicated to sucking up the blown out dust. I could feel the air sucking into the drive-through from both ends which tells me little or no dust was escaping from the box other than through the vacuum. The attachments on the drive-through sit several inches above the train and no car has been sucked up or derailed.

I figure the money spent for the extra shop vac will be well worth time saved over the years.

Some considerations for this were:

1) I didn't want the paint or decals or other stuff blown off the trains. I worked with various attachments to make sure it was not too much air pressure. One could make the ends wider or narrower on the attachments.

2) I was concerned about parts being sucked up. The vacuum hasn't sucked up any parts from the models. I made sure the vacuums were emptied before I started vacuuming. If there is loose coal in hoppers or light unattached loads, they would get blown out and/or sucked up for sure. None of the coal from my tenders got sucked in so it was pretty secure there.

3) The stinger is absolutely clean on the inside and dedicated to blowing air on the trains only. The other two vacs can be used for any other general use.