US Style Track in S - Jameston & Leven River RR

JimG

Western Thunderer
Dave,

I haven't thought of what I'm going to use as switch levers for the pointwork as yet. I'll probably have to go digging around on some US web sites to see what I can pick up in S scale, or I might try and find a simple prototype which I can scratch build fairly easily. I'm not sure if I would fit indicators - that would mean making them a working model and I might not find the time for that.

Jim.
 

Jordan

Mid-Western Thunderer
What about Caboose Industries Ground Throws? If they're good enough for P48-ers like Mike Cougill, they're good enough for bodgers like me!! :cool:
I use the N Scale version, which has just enough 'throw' (about 1/8inch, & an omega loop in the wire) for my switches. Goodness only knows how far the 'proper' O scale one throws!! Probably designed for 3-rail.!! :confused:
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Edit - just as an aside, I don't know by what criteria C.I. "scale" their ground throws; as you can see above, the mortal remains of where a Peco HO Code 83 switch was just behind this one, it is clear that the ground throw would be well oversize for it's intended scale!!
 
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JimG

Western Thunderer
What about Caboose Industries Ground Throws? If they're good enough for P48-ers like Mike Cougill, they're good enough for bodgers like me!! :cool:

Jordan,

That's the kind of switch stand I'm looking for - like in this UP industrial version.

I don't want any with high indicators since I will be manually uncoupling cars and anything sticking up close to the track is bound to get clobbered. :) It also only needs to be cosmetic since I'll be using servos to operate the pointwork.

Jim.
 

Simon

Flying Squad
What a great drawing, I don't suppose you've got or seen anything similar for the British equivalent as I want to make working yard levers for Launceston Road and I'm having difficulty finding information on the mechanism used.

I mean the "modern" type rather than MacNee etc

Sorry to crash the thread..

Simon
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
What a great drawing, I don't suppose you've got or seen anything similar for the British equivalent as I want to make working yard levers for Launceston Road and I'm having difficulty finding information on the mechanism used.

I mean the "modern" type rather than MacNee etc

Simon,

I don't. My US drawings come from an excellent resource I found online

Technical Specifications for Construction of Industrial Tracks

...giving a list of PDFs with full details of Union Pacific industrial track. I've never seen anything comparable for British track but I would use my line specific society - in my case the Caledonian Railway Association - to try to dig up any information. This thread on the CRA forum is typical.

Caledonian Railway Association Forum • View topic - Point Levers

When you say you don't want something like the MacNee type, I got the feeling that the older types lasted well into more modern times in yards and sidings where the track and its accessories probably hadn't changed since pre-Grouping days.

Jim.
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
Jim

The UPRR Technical specification link is brilliant :thumbs:.

Isn't it just. :) The only problem might be that the tracks specified are quite heavyweight if you want to model a backwater, Class 3 railroad, but I find it useful since it gives me what top quality industrial track should be then I apply a bit of downgrading. :)

Jim
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
After a bit of a break I got back into a bit of S scale tracklaying again this week. The poor weather meant that I couldn't get out into the garden, so it was back to spiking again. :) I had run into a problem when milling more self guarding frog parts which meant checking over my milling machine and the milling operation but I didn't find any reason for the problem, when the mill was cutting to deep in places. However, I had enough bits to make up two frogs which meant that I could go ahead with the complex of two turnouts and a diamond crossing on one of the centre baseboards.

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I had started laying the timbering for this complex last month, but ran out of cut timber and had to send off for some more 2mm plywood. The milling machine was also tied up with other matter - see above - so I didn't have the chance to cut up some more timber. But I geared up on Tuesday to start cutting the ply and started accumulating a pile ready to go - at the top of the picture - and that load didn't go all that far, This timbering eats up plywood at a phenomenal rate, especially with the pitch of US timbers being smaller than the UK practice.

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The two self guarding frogs have been laid as well as the upper stock rail on the "main" road. T he procedure for laying is slightly different now since the timbers are not pre-drilled - like the ties on plain track. I am now sticking the tieplates down on the timbers with reference to the Templot drawings. The spike holes are then drilled with a 0.5mm drill then the rail is laid in place and the spikes inserted.

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A slightly closer shot of the track showing the tieplates with spikes every five or so ties on the upper rail. The rail appears to be quite firmly held with this amount of spiking so I'm considering limiting the amount of spiking to this amount and to fill in the spaces with tieplates only and no spikes. The closer rail shows this. I'll see if I can live with this - it will certainly make life easier, and tracklaying a lot quicker. :) If I can't live with it, then I can always order up more spikes from Andy Riechart, drill hundreds of holes, and drive in all the missing spikes. :)

You might also note the small piece of 20thou Plastikard on edge near the centre of the lower rail. This is keeping an insulating gap in the rail while it is being laid and will be replaced with plastic fishplates and a small dollop of Araldite once all the tracklaying is complete.

The diamond crossing will be built with normal frogs (crossings). I can't find any evidence that the self guarding principle was used in diamonds - possibly not enough required compared to turnouts to warrant making them and probably too many variations of crossing angles as well.

Jim.
 

Yorkshire Dave

Western Thunderer
Good trackwork Jim :thumbs:.

This timbering eats up plywood at a phenomenal rate, especially with the pitch of US timbers being smaller than the UK practice.

And tieplates :eek:.


with spikes every five or so ties

I've seen this done quite often in the US model press and after ballasting and weathering it looks okay.


The diamond crossing will be built with normal frogs (crossings). I can't find any evidence that the self guarding principle was used in diamonds - possibly not enough required compared to turnouts to warrant making them and probably too many variations of crossing angles as well.

I don't think I seen photographs of diamonds in yards. Most tend to be on main lines and traversed at speed. As we know they are always hammered hard. OWLS crossings appear on main lines but these tend to be around 90 degrees.
 

Jordan

Mid-Western Thunderer
As my track can only really be viewed from one side, I still spike every tie on the visible side, but only every fifth tie on straights and third tie on curves on the hidden side of each rail.
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
As my track can only really be viewed from one side, I still spike every tie on the visible side, but only every fifth tie on straights and third tie on curves on the hidden side of each rail.

Jordan,

My track will only be viewed from one side as well, so I might look at doing something similar. It will really only apply to the pointwork since I've made most of the plain track and that is fully spiked.

Jim.
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
When the weather was poor and no work was being done in the garden, the US track got a bit of attention.

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Work went on with the diamond, laying down "normal" crossing noses rather than the self-guarding variety and the second "K" crossing was laid with everything lining up across the two roads. I made life easy for myself by making the two crossing roads dead straight. :)

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Then all the bits and bobs were added, being soldered in the main to the nickel silver pads spiked to the ties. The check rails were also soldered to small nickel silver pads which were soldered to the adjacent stock rails. The check and wing rails have planed ends rather than bent ends.

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...and a shot of the completed diamond crossing though still lacking a good few tieplates.

I then ploughed on with the four turnouts on this board. I had a re-think about the methods for making and fitting the tiebars. I wasn't too happy with the operating rods being brass wire soldered to the PCB tiebar. I didn't really have room to have good fillets of solder to get a lot of strength in the joints and there wasn't enough meat in the copper film to allow a decent countersink to allow a good depth of solder. So I re-designed the brass pins to have a flange to provide a stronger joint to the PCB. This meant doing a bit of sausage machine work on the Cowells. :)

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The first job was to turn down the stub to fit in the PCB tiebar to 1mm diameter. This was made 3mm long because I needed that length to give a good grip when the piece was reversed to turn the other end. The larger diameter was turned to 2mm diameter. It looks a bit wasteful using 4mm bar stock for the job but it's what I had in hand from B&Q's metal rack. :) By the way, it turned quite nicely which is more than can be said for some of the other sections from that source. :)

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I then finished up with a small pile of parts for the turnouts left to do, plus one or two to allow for the ping factor.

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The parts were then chucked in the collet chuck and the ends which would operate the blades being turned down to 1mm diameter and 1mm high with a 2mm diameter flange 0.15mm thick.

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Some of the finished parts are shown on the right. It took a while to do the job, each bit taking about ten minutes to do. A set up production lathe could probably do the same job in ten seconds for the lot. :) It also took me a bit of time to work out the best way of doing it - like finding out the best length of part to hold in the collet chuck.

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All the parts for the tiebar assembly with the PCB tiebar suitably gapped, two of the brass pins and the two point blades with short sections of brass strip soldered to them and drilled to take the pins. By the way, you can just see the solder fillet in the web of the point blades. This was necessary since I found out that the web was paper thin so some reinforcing was necessary.

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The two pins are soldered to the tiebar using the solder paste (still going strong :) )

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The over-length stubs are snipped off and the bottom of the tiebar filed smooth.

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The tiebar in place. It is slipped in under the point blades then lifted up so that the brass pins engage the holes on the point blade fittings. Then a strip of 1mm (40thou) Plastikard is slipped under the tiebar to hold it in position. You can see the end of the Plastikard strip just below the stock rail close to camera. The real reason for doing this is to provide a system which would allow the tiebar setup to be stripped down to allow maintenance. The end of the Plastikard strip will be hidden under ballast which would have to be dug out to get the strip out. This would be the only "damage" to the trackwork and that could be easily made good when the tiebar assembly was rebuilt. The top surface of the PCB tiebar will be covered in ballast to disguise it. On my first exhibition layout many years ago, a tiebar on a key three way turnout gave way at the start of the first day and I do remember all the cursing at the time when trying to repair it - hence the efforts to avoid any repeat. :)

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...and a quick jump on to the completed board with four turnouts appearing magically. :) This will be one of the central boards of four and it contains the most trackwork. The other central board contains a tandem and another turnout and that will be the next board to do after I've popped over to C&L and re-stocked with rail and cork underlay. I've mainly spiked the P&C work on every fifth tie and I'm leaving it like that at the moment until I get more supplies of spikes from Andy Riechert. I've only got 500 left out of the 3000 originally ordered and that will just about do the P&C work on the next board. I used to think building chaired track was slow. :)

Jim.
 
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JimG

Western Thunderer
I moved on to the trackwork for the last board, the other central one. There are only two turnouts on this board but one is a tandem and I opted to make this with standard crossings rather than the self guarding type since I reckoned that tandems were relatively rare in US yard trackage and that specialised self guarding castings would probably not have been available.

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To help matters with the central crossings on the tandem, I machined a base from nickel silver sheet with guides for the base of the flat-bottom rail. This worked quite well and the crossings were built up fairly quickly with the line up of rails being helped by the guides.

Work went on after this to complete the tandem and the other trackage around it. But when I started running the test truck through the crossings I found a lot of drop-in at the crossings noses and I wasn't too happy about it. I had misread the track and wheel standards for US S Scale. I'm used to the convention this side of the pond where standards give the preferred measurements with tolerances whereas on the other side of the pond, max and min dimensions are quoted and you seem to be able to pick what you want. :) I had read the flangeway dimension as 1.25mm/0.050" and used that for the crossings on the diamond in the other board and everything had worked well. But the angle of the diamond crossing was relatively sharp at 1:3.5 so teh gap at the crossing noses was fairly small and there was little drop-in. However, on a 1:7 crossing, the gap became quite large and there was considerable drop-in. So the decision was made to scrap the crossings on the tandem and start again with wing rail gaps of 1mm/0.040" and that has worked well with minimal drop-in.

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Here's a shot of the finished track with the tandem in the foreground and the other turnout, with a self guarding frog, in the background.

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...and another shot showing a bit more of the detail.

The next job is to get the baseboards ready to take the track. There's still a bit more track to make but that is mostly going to be inset so it will have to be built on the baseboards.

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...and a wee beauty of an interloper tries out some foreign rails - a Caledonian dumb-buffered wagon courtesy of ScottW of this parish and his Perth and District wagon works. ::) You can note that I was only spiking roughly every fifth tie as I had on the other board, mainly because I was running out of spikes and waiting further supplies from Andy Riechert's Proto:87 Works. However, they did arrive a day or two ago so I can proceed with filling in the missing spikes when I pluck up the energy and interest. :) I didn't pay any tax or handling charge this time round so that would seem to confirm that importing from the US seems to be a bit of a lottery in that respect. :)

I'll maybe have a break from this and get back out into the garden if the weather improves. I've also got other jobs to do as well and I've got to get some artwork off to PPD fairly soon.

Jim.
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
While all the machinations were going on about the garden layout, I got a bit more done to the switching layout. The set of baseboards I intended to use were built two years ago for another project and are featured here.

However I wanted to build in a bit of relief on the layout and I had intended to do that using extruded polystyrene foam. But I couldn't source any locally and online suppliers only seemed interested in selling multi-packs which would have been expensive overkill. :) So I opted to use thin ply supported on 44mm softwood battens to do the raising.

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Here are the boards laid out with the additional work done on them and the track laid roughly in position. The space closest to camera on the upper picture will have a wooden pier structure carrying two tracks for the loading harbour. The space nearest camera on the lower picture will accommodate the railroad barge - my hidden siding system. :)

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This shot shows the trough at the back of the boards into which will go the Tortoise motors. I was going to use servos to operate the turnouts but I have a dozen Tortoise motors salvaged from a S7 layout many years ago and I thought it best to use them on this when I could allow for their relatively bulky size.

The garden layout does come in handy. :)

Jim.
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
While all the machinations were going on about the garden layout, I got a bit more done to the switching layout. The set of baseboards I intended to use were built two years ago for another project and are featured here.

However I wanted to build in a bit of relief on the layout and I had intended to do that using extruded polystyrene foam. But I couldn't source any locally and online suppliers only seemed interested in selling multi-packs which would have been expensive overkill. :) So I opted to use thin ply supported on 44mm softwood battens to do the raising.

US-S-SwitchingLayout-080.jpg

US-S-SwitchingLayout-081.jpg


Here are the boards laid out with the additional work done on them and the track laid roughly in position. The space closest to camera on the upper picture will have a wooden pier structure carrying two tracks for the loading harbour. The space nearest camera on the lower picture will accommodate the railroad barge - my hidden siding system. :)

US-S-SwitchingLayout-082.jpg

This shot shows the trough at the back of the boards into which will go the Tortoise motors. I was going to use servos to operate the turnouts but I have a dozen Tortoise motors salvaged from a S7 layout many years ago and I thought it best to use them on this when I could allow for their relatively bulky size.

The garden layout does come in handy. :)

Jim.
 
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JimG

Western Thunderer
After I got the S scale trackwork I was building for someone else out of the way, I set up the US switching layout baseboards in the back of the lounge and started fixing the track down permanently. For this layout I've gone back to my original method of doing baseboard joins - using brass countersunk screws at the rail ends to anchor them. However, this time round I have made a change. I used to set the screw height such that the rail sat on the screw head when it was soldered. But in a previous layout I ran into a problem with some joins where there had been a bit of baseboard movement over the years and some rail ends had to be adjusted down the way, which wasn't possible with the rails hard on top of the screw heads. It required a fair bit of messing around to lift the track and adjust the screws down. So now I'm leaving a gap between the rail and the screw head to be filled with solder so that the rail can easily be adjusted down in the future if it ever becomes necessary.

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I set the screw height using a small jig made up from layers of Plastikard

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...and here's the gap between rail base and screw head.

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All the rail ends had the screws fitted - 2 x 1/2" brass off Ebay.

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The Templot templates were stripped off the board and I also double-checked that all the countersunk screws holding the ply top down were flush.

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The track section was flipped over and the underside was coated with carpet glue - B&Q's cheapest. :)

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The track was then positioned and weighted down with a large sheet of plate glass and a couple of weights at the ends where the glass wasn't long enough. There's a bit of history with the glass. It came out of a ransacked dairy shop in the old Gorbals in Glasgow. I was part of a film crew over forty years ago which was filming the Gorbals area in Glasgow. It was being demolished to make way for a new housing scheme and the film we were shooting was recording the architecture of the area - which had been some of the best proportioned architecture in Victorian Glasgow. The glass had been a shelf in the dairy and had suffered a badly chipped corner when it had fallen to the floor. The chip is still there - top left in the picture. One of these days I might get it trimmed and bevelled. :)

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When the glue had set and the rails were soldered to the screws, the rails were trimmed back close to length with my Xurons then the final finishing to length was done with the 10" file.

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I only had one problem on the last board joint. The single track siding was the last job I was doing at the end of the day and I was keen to make sure the track was glued down in horizontal alignment and omitted to take care with the vertical alignment. When I checked it in the morning, the rail ends were sitting too high and they could noy be pressed down. The glue had been over-thick at the end of the track and when it had set, it was as good as solid. So the only course was to cut and remove several inches of the track and cork underlay which will be replaced.

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So far I have relaid the cork underlay and re-printed the appropriate bit of the Templot drawing and I'll lay in the ties and rails when I'm doing the other bits of track still to be done.

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...And two views of the situation so far, with nearly all of the track laid. The main parts remaining to be done are the dockside tracks and the barge pier ramp.

Jim.
 

JimG

Western Thunderer
Have pressed the 'like' button as it's great trackwork, but you'll never get rough & rickety track by doing things properly...

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Jordan,

I did try "Jordan Rickety" early on - it was the turnout and headshunt at the harbour end of the loop (at the very top of the last picture with the black hopper car on it). I took the turnout and headshunt up to the club to show my first attempt at a self guarding frog and almost everybody eyed up the track and turnout and didn't say much. :) I assumed they thought I hadn't read the book on tracklaying. :) So I thought it was easier to build everything as near perfect as possible to avoid the silent opprobium. :) I have to confess that I did have a passing thought about leaving the poor track joint as it was as a token. :)

But your track looks excellent. I might take a lump hammer to mine one day. :)

Jim.
 
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