Skip Garbage Day By Putting Your Trash Bins on a Train


Dragging our various trash and recycling bins to the curb in -10 degrees Fahrenheit weather this morning, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a better way. It turns out there is, but it involves spending months engineering and re-engineering of a miniature train that takes the trash to the curb for you.

The phrase, “work smarter, not harder,” immediately comes to mind when you see it YouTube’s Max Maker’s latest creation in motion, even if perfecting this contraption took more work than a lifetime of dragging bins to the curb ever would.

After plans for a new driveway meant that a small shed containing his house’s assorted trash bins would need to be demolishedMax Maker saw it as an opportunity to make trash pickup day (which apparently only happens once a month where they live) much simpler. All the manual labor would be replaced by pressing a single button on a wireless remote, which activates a bin-hauling train that chugs out to the street and back again, all under its own power.

I put my trash cans on rails and now they move automaticallyly! (Trash Train)

All the unique challenges of building this refuse railway are detailed in a 15-minute video, but the process was actually easier and cheaper than extending the brickwork from the front of the building to the side where the bins were being moved. The biggest challenge to making it all work was finding a way to give the wheels on the train’s engine enough grip to push all the bins once they were weigheded down by trash. The solution was to employ a gearing system that works alongside a gear rack added to one of the train’s rails.

The train’s engine is even powered by off-the-shelf power tool batteries, which are automatically charged when the train returns to the end of the line, like a robot vacuum returning to its dock. Once installed, the trash train really doesn’t need any maintenance, aside from ensuring snow doesn’t build up in the winter time.

It’s more polished than most of the custom creations shared on YouTube, but that’s because Max Maker intends to possibly put this idea into production one day, so anyone tired of taking out the trash could install one themselves. The only challenge I can think of, as I stare out the window at the empty trash bins now strewn across my driveway, is convincing the sanitation workers to return the bins to the train once emptied.



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