The photo below shows my Vacuum Cleaner Car 2.0. Most forum members will understand what I’ve done and what was involved, as soon as they study the photo. I’ve mounted a rechargeable hand-held vacuum cleaner on a 14-inch flatcar so that it sucks up material from the track.
A New One Because I Wore Out the Old One
I made my first vacuum cleaner car fifteen years ago (the guts of a Dustbuster mounted on a custom-built chassis) and posted about it here seven years ago.
https://ogrforum.com/...ar-that-really-sucks
Vacuum Cleaner car 1.0 turned out to be much more useful than I expected. I ran it at about once a month for years, and although I take care of my layout and often would use a shop vac to keep it “dust-free,” that car would always come back after a few times around my track with more “crud” in its bin than I would have thought possible.
A Quick Look At Commercially Available Vacuum Cleaner Cars for N and HO
Atlas makes a really nice vacuum cleaner car in N, shown below left, and offers the same design scaled up for HO scale, too. I had an N-Gauge one like that years ago when I had a full nest and could only fit a small N-scale layout in the house while raising three boys. It always came back after a brief run with a surprising amount of stuff it found to suck up. Atlas’s vacuum cleaner cars are marketed under the brand names Atlas, Dapol, and Tomix. Atlas announced ten or more years ago it was scaling the design up to O scale, but never did that and stopped talking about it on their website about eight years ago. I found out why and will get to that in a moment.
There are also one or two less expensive vacuum cleaner cars like TrackVac sold for HO (above right). It looks to be a very tiny “desktop vacuum” converted to run on HO trucks. I don’t have experience with it, but I imagine it works although probably not as well as the Atlas/Dapol/Tomix vacuum cars which cost three times as much. I found a few of these offered for O-scale too: someone working in their garage mounting small desktop vacuums on small inspective flatcars and selling them via e-bay, etc. They may work but I suspect not nearly as well as I need . . .
The First Point to Keep In Mind: You Can’t Power A Good O-Gauge Vacuum Car From The Track
Atlas and most other N and HO and the small O-Gauge vac-cars I looked at get the power to run their vacuum motor from the track. The Atas N and HO vac-cars work well, drawing about .6 and 1.75 amps respectively at 12 to 14 volts to run their motors. But powering the vacuum from the track really won’t work well with O-Gauge, and this has nothing to do with the fact that O-Gauge uses AC rather than DC power (you could easily install a rectifier to get around that problem).
Rather, “the problem” is the amount of power a track-powered O-Gauge vacuum cleaner car needs to clean O-Gauge track well. It needs about 10 Amps. O-Gauge track is twice as wide as HO, so you might think that a vacuum needed only twice the power of HO to do a good job. But scale O-gauge track is twice as deep, too – and hi-rail track, as most of us on this forum have, is more than twice as deep. So an O-Gauge vacuum cleaner car running at around 12 to 14 volt is going to need something close to four to six times what is required in HO to do a really superb job – around 10 amps at 12 to 14 volts. That means you could run it off track power, but there would be nothing left to power the loco within the typical 10-amp power supply limit.
Coincidently, almost all the rechargeable hand-held vacuums you can buy are 12V and 120 watts – they want 10 amps at 12 volts. They have a wall wart to plug in and power them or recharge them from a wall outlet but they are all designed so they will work from a car’s cigarette-lighter auxiliary power outlet, which means they are designed to use 10 amps (just within the cars fuse or breaker limit), at 12 volts.
So, I recommend buying a compact rechargeable handheld and just mounting it on a flatcar, keeping its battery and using it as a rechargeable rather than removing the battery and installing a rectifier on a car with electrical pickups. It’s less work too: just buy one that will fit well on a flatcar - a long, thin one seems best. I bought a brand called MooSoo because it looked like it was small in diameter and would fit through my tunnels and such (it does), but there are many to choose from.
Second Point to Keep In Mind: Build the Car So It Holds Both the Vacuum and its Charger.
Otherwise it is too easy to put the charger somewhere else after you have used the vacuum and forget where it is the next time you need to clean up the track. (You can guess how I discovered this).
Anyway, this vacuum cleaner car is really useful. I wore out vacuum cleaner car 1.0 after about twelve years of use, and have had Vacuum Cleaner car 2.0 for about a year now. I recently used if after I thought I had cleaned up well with a shop vac, when I finally had completed rebuilding my country road with all the mess that created - tearing up the scenery, installing the road, sanding and sealing and resanding the road surface, reinstalling scenery and grass and bushes, etc.. It caused a huge dusty mess but I cleaned up well with a shop vac afterward.
In this latest use, as you see it below, I ran the my vacuum cleaner car after I shop-vacced the layout, and ran to loco backwards so the vacuum picked up any debris before it might have a chance to get caught in the loco’s wheels, etc. I had to empty its bin twice before it would finally come back with nothing new in it, even though I had vaccuumed the layout with that shop vac. A vacuum cleaner car just gets to places that aren't easy to get at with the shop vac and gets down and close to the track. And it is easy and convenient to run. I'm glad I have it.
