Model Railway Forum

Magnificent, brilliant, awesome, wow! What is left to say

Thank you all for the comments - really appreciated.

Another day, another bridge.

20210616_183237 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

20210616_183314 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

Steve - coming a little late with my feedback, so apologises.........Can only echo the comments from everybody else - absolutely cracking work and done at such a pace...........I have some hills and tunnels ( but no bridges planned, at the moment) coming up in the next stage of my layout, so I am sure I will be referring back to this many times to check how it should be done.

Cheers - Richard

Richard - at least you will know the pitfalls.

Now then, what should I tackle next?

I need to do some running tests, and assuming that goes well, probably ballasting.

I may have a decision to make before then - the layout was deliberately made on removable boards, but having been working on the layout for three months I have only had to move three boards, ie the ones with all the electrics on them. All the other boards have the rails cut at the board joints but I did notice one had ‘moved’ even though the joint has not been disturbed.
Running may lead to the joints on the tunnel and bridge boards being replaced with continuous rails if they prove troublesome.

Bit of a challenge choosing the ballast though - I suspect that both of my local shops have closed so it’s a challenge to see what is available. I did buy some ‘fine’ WWS ballast - it’s the size of small boulders!!

I have heard chinchilla sand being used but would welcome any comments if anyone has experience of using this.

Ah. You have had similar issues to which I have had in the past where plan B was to use short sections of rail to bridge the gap across thr board joint, so these rails are simply removed when the boards are seperated. My only issue is that my layout is in the garage at the moment being stored, and the custom made rails are put somewhere safe... Uhmm. Not in the same place as the layout! Where were they?

Assuming the rail ends are only a mm or so apart when the boards are in situ, can you not slide a fish plate over the joint? This can then be slid back if you need to remove the board later.

teedoubleudee wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:11 pm Assuming the rail ends are only a mm or so apart when the boards are in situ, can you not slide a fish plate over the joint? This can then be slid back if you need to remove the board later.

That would be an ideal solution if it were not for the copious amounts of solder I used.
I’d been thinking of a solution very similar to the one suggested by MG but will probably end up with a mix of the two.
It’s only a couple of joints that have ‘moved’ so at present it’s not a big job to adjust them (hopefully).
I suspect I will have to do more in time though.

It hasn’t been particularly productive in the shed in the last couple of days. I went out on Friday with the intention of testing and tweaking the track where necessary, but ended up reinstalling the old LED lighting in the frame holding up Low Ghyll.
It all works but access was a bit awkward and the result was a torn back muscle.

Today I was able to start the testing, fully expecting to have to ‘work’ on the cross board joints. But I was able to adjust a couple of joints without relaying or modifying - it’s a lot cooler than last weekend so I think they are very temperature dependent.

One off-scene corner was troubling a Black 5 but I was able to replace the two Setrack R2/3 curves with a length of flexi set to R3 which seems to have fixed the problem.

The search for suitable ballast material continues - as I mentioned before both local shops appear to be no longer trading high complicates things. Fortunately forum member sent me a spare bag of medium ballast to help out. I also picked up a bag of chinchilla sand (on special offer at Wilkos) to experiment with.

The chinchilla sand is grey (good start) but has a lot of very fine dust included - I sieved the bag and separated the fines from the coarser grains. The fine stuff could come in handy for yards and road surfaces.

Set up a test in the photo below.
No 4 WWS ‘fine’ light grey
No 3 Woodland Scenics medium grey
No 2 ‘medium/coarse’ chinchilla sand
No 1 ‘fine’ chinchilla dust

Still to make up my mind.

2021-06-20_05-20-17 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

In my view 4 definitely not. 3 pretty good. 2 and 1 look very good.