Sunday 20 January 2013

Track

At long last I've started tracklaying. Here are a few progress shots.

1. I'm using a mixture of Easitrac and PCB sleepers. So far I've glued down the PCB sleepers on the printed Templot plan. Essentially I'm following Jim Watt's practice of PCB sleepers for the switches and crossing areas, with Easitrac everywhere else. With the interlaced timbering, most of the sleepers are ordinary length. The reason for this hybrid approach is that I'm worried about the flimsiness of all-plastic points in this scale, and also the inability to make easy adjustments.

2. Close-up showing one turnout where I've used more PCB sleepers owing to the interlaced catch points (I wanted my sidings to hold as many wagons as possible!). You can see that I've started adding etched chairplates.

3. On the PCB sleepers I'm using Versaline chair plates (and will eventually use the accompanying whitemetal cosmetic chairs). Following advice in the track book I'm pre-tinning these on both sides. I used solder paint which makes this job simple. Owing to the non-standard sleeper arrangement, I'm not using the Versaline jig, just locating the chairplates by eye. I'm also not using them at their intended locations.