Hi Kieran,
There are a couple ways that you can control your trains through capacitive touch. You will probably need a micro-controller to sense the capacitive touch, and have the micro-controller trigger some relays to turn your trains power on and off. Depending on your level of programming proficiency, you could either use a traditional
Arduino board and a capacitive touch shield such as this one:
Or you could use something like the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express that has capacitive touch sensitive pads built in. There are only 7 pads on the Circuit Playground though, so you could only control 4 trains with a single controller. The big advantage is that you could program it with MakeCode which is much easier than Arduino. Plus we have tutorials on how to use the capacitive touch feature of the Circuit Playground Express:
and if you want to program using CircuitPython:
I hope that helps! Please share your completed project with us when you have finished it!
