Article of the Month

Renovating Triang turnouts (and track)

This month, our victim for destruction is the track-work. Any of my avid viewers will know that Northcott was getting seriously behind schedule and as a consequence has probably pushed Burrafield back to 2000/2001 for starting !

Although I am an accomplished track builder with copper-clad (sadly using inferior gauges), I did not really consider that I had the time to spare building the track for a small project like this.

Idea no. 1 was to utilise re-gauged Peco Streamline OO track with copper-clad turnouts - this started well, but I was having the usual problem of not finding the right adhesive at the right price to stick the plastic mouldings down so that they did not flex out of gauge (the alternative was to nail every third sleeper on each side - life really is too short for this, and this would have probably added 5 kg to the layout weight in nails alone !!)

But then it came ......

Instead of running down the road with towel loosely draped like Aristotle, I just danced around the floor a bit (the kids consider this prefectly normal behaviour from me) ... the obvious answer was to re-rail Triang stuff with new rail.

If you take your average bit of Peco Streamline that has seen more than two visits on to baseboards on past OO layouts, it is getting shabby in the sleeper area, but the rail is just fine and fits exactly into Triang TT track bases, so you can just nickel-silver your old layout from one end to the other, but here are the Butchers Guide tips to the Turnouts.

Both outer rails are easy - just cut new rails to fit, file in recesses for the point blades and slide in. The two inners are slightly more problematic, as these have the dubious duty of transferring traction current when the turnout is set correctly. My tip is to cut the rail to fit, but also cut a Peco OO fishplate in half, solder a wire to the bottom of each fishplate and thread these into the two obvious holes under these rails about 1cm in from the ends and slide the rail into these too. These wires can back-up (or replace, in my case) the sliding power tabs at the nose of the turnout, when fitted to a DPDT switch tandemed with the changeover mechanism - any one who has tried to get a OO layout working will know how problematic these horrid little tabs can be in killing traction current dead when they don't quite connect ! You will note that no mention has been made about the point blades themselves - my estimations are that the blades from Peco medium-radius points would be suitable, but you have a pigs-own job securing them to the existing sleeper-base - so suffer them gladly, or change them madly !

If you treat the turnouts seperately, but lay solid rail without gapping and fishplates on the plain-track areas, then the only time you need to slide fishplates is to release a turnout for replacement (it is unlikely that plain track will need lifting or replacing once laid, unless you get it wrong in the first place !!)

With this little trick on the go, I should be playing trains very soon indeed !

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January 1999