Thanks for posting this project. My son loves trains. When I have time we’re going to use this to build a project together. Where can I get the trains and tracks? My son’s only 8 and he’s obsessed with trains. He would love for us to build something like this together.
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The two main brands are LGB and Piko. Both brands offer starter kits including a train and rails. These are powered through the rails, but changing to battery power is possible, using standard RC components.
There are also many small brands, mostly in UK, who offer wood kits for building locomotives, eg IP Engineering, these are usually already thought for remote control. There is also a ready to run remote controlling system similar to mine available at http://www.locoremote.co.uk/
There are a lot of possibilities 
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@ericgray you also have the Lego train sets… which might be a great starting point for that age group…
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Not a lot of programming these days, but testing, as the random failures were rather annoying…
On the second locomotive I never had any problem (but another setup, rpi0 2w, other battery), so I swapped the quite old SD card in the first loco with a new one, and surprise: Since then it just works.
So if one encounter seemingly random failures, it’s worh checking the SD card 
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