Track Template is ready for construction

After finishing the prep in the house for the arrival of our Au Pair and a bit of a chill afterwards, the last few evenings have been taken up by preparing a more detailed and thorough track template onto which I am going to build my track work.

This is the track template as it stands. I have tidied up the geometry of most of the curves and have added 3.3mm regular sleepers in black and 4mm turnout timbers in green.

I am planning to get it done in one hit and hopefully build it as the lengths bullhead rail come thus keeping track joins to a minimum to increase the rigidity of the track work, well that's the plan anyway! Being a DCC controlled layout there will be a minimum of cuts in the rail, as there will be no isolating sections, just the ones needed at the baseboard joins and on the point work.

The only experience I have had of making any track work is at Cardiff MES, of which I am a member, and have assisted in producing a couple of points on a complicated section of track on the approach to the station on the layout that is currently under construction.

I am a bit of a perfectionist and with the aid of my template I'm sure I will be able to produce some good quality results if I take it one step at a time and don't rush things.

All I need to do now is persuade my find to print it out full size as he did with the track plan and the building will commence!

The track layout of Tower Street station can be found here.

The Completed Baseboards

With a busy schedule, again progress has been slow, but I am glad to say that at last, the two baseboards are complete and have been joined using fixings from a redundant bed from work that was at the end of its life (I manage rented accommodation for students and young professionals).

Back in the kitchen workshop, (only available when my better half is out of the house) and as with the last board, I started by gluing and screwing the end rails and the straight back rail to the baseboard top.

After this I added the cross members and came to the front rail with the compound curve in it. As mentioned before the plan was to use two layers of 6mm bendy MDF laminating them to form the curve.

While cutting the wood I allowed an extra millimetre clearance should any discrepancy's happen, in the end the MDF soaked up the PVA and expanded quite a lot, I managed to hold most of the expansion screwing small batons over the relevant places. Where I was not able to do this the deviance from the original curve has only been 1 or 2mm at most. At leaset all of this will be covered by the final profile board! Next time I will experiment with just one layer of bendy MDF as I don't think the rigidity of the overall structure will be compromised too much.

Next the bottom board was glued and screwed in place and again access holes were cut using the jigsaw. The two boards were then taken back up to the hobbies room and clamped together ready to drill the holes for the metal inserts.

M5 socket head bolts to match the inserts were also salvaged from the bed. I managed to get a total of 16 inserts and plenty of screws allowing four bolts per baseboard join to be used. The one thread from each of the pairs of inserts have been drilled out to 6mm so that the bolt can pass through. I did this so that the head of the bolt has a hard surface to bare against rather than just the wood and to prevent he hole from being enlarged by the thread of the bolt. I had designed a version of the pattern makers dowel, which are recommended by John de Frayssinet of County Gate fame, the only difference being they would be large enough to have a hole through the centre to accommodate an M6 or M8 bolt. I will save that design for my next project!

Next up...

I need to decide which surface to build the track on. Chris Nevard, in his recent article in Model Rail, recommends making the track directly on the top of the baseboard by drawing the track layout on the board, gluing the sleepers down and once dry, soldering the track in place. Another method I have used in conjunction with Alan French at Cardiff MES, is to stick the sleepers to the printed track plan with double sided tape and to solder the track to the sleepers, once assembled pulling away the paper backing and pinning & gluing the whole lot down.

Again, writing the blog and airing various ways of doing things really puts things into perspective and Chris's method starts to seem much more simple and straight forward!!

This is my first layout, and while having helped to make a couple of points at the club, I don't have much experience of copper clad construction, so please do comment if you have any top tips or any other methods of producing the copper clad track work.