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Steam Locomotive Coal Tender

This is a very basic coal tender that I built to resupply my most recent attempt at a steam powered locomotive. It has a little over 1100 units of coal in the hopper and a few thousand liters of fresh water stored in a tank under the coal hoppers. There are hose anchors on the sides to refill the water tank. The coal hoppers can be refilled from above. There are winches with 40 meters of hose located on the sides of the tender to run water hoses to the water ports on the side of the leading locomotive. There is also a small port located on the front of the tender equipped with a small pump to transfer water out of the tender or potentially use it fight a fire should one occur. The hoses can be found near the water ports but have to be rotated out using the gray switches labelled "Equipment Storage." The tender was built to use my personal train system controller allowing it to connect to my other cars and locomotives. It also has a very small assortment of personal equipment for someone working on or with the tender.

The tender now has my electric motor assist system which uses multiple small electric motors connected to the axles to assist the locomotive with pulling the car and the train as a whole. Simply press the orange switch to the left of the brake lever, release the brakes, and push the car either forward or reverse along the rails. The system uses a directional velocity sensor and sends a fractional output to the throttle for the motors. This allows the car to propel itself forward as long as the batteries hold a charge.

The external control system takes into consideration if the locomotive is facing the same direction as the controlling locomotive as well as if it is in front of or behind the controlling locomotive. The "External Control" switch indicates if the locomotive is not the controlling vehicle in the train, while the "Power from Rear" switch indicates that the controlling vehicle is "Behind" the current vehicle. This means that normally data would be passed from the front vehicle along the train to the rear vehicle, but it can be configured to control the train from any position in the consist without issues. There is also a switch to invert the transmitted reverser position in the event that the current locomotive is not facing the same direction as the controlling locomotive.

The micro-controller uses the following channels to control all vehicles in a consist:

Numbers:
- 1. Throttle Position of controlling vehicle
- 2. Reverser Position of controlling vehicle
- 3. Independent Brake Position of controlling vehicle
- 4. Train Brake Position of controlling vehicle