Wire

I've been looking for somewhere that I can get hold of copper wire for making rail droppers and just come across www.wires.co.uk which seems to stock just about every gauge and every type of wire you could imagine!

MRJ Index site down

Apologies if you've tried to access the MRJ Index site in the last couple of hours and wondered why all you can see is an error page. Blame the hosting company.... they decided to migrate my account onto a different server but didn't warn me beforehand, so now I've got to wait for the nameservers to update which could take up to 48 hours. Ggrrrrr!

Watlington

I'm currently reading 'Country Branch Line', Paul Karau & Chris Turner's 2 volume history of the Watlington Branch, published by Wild Swan. It's an absolutely superb and highly detailed account of the line and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Working from the (roughly to scale) 1948 track plan in Paul Karau's earlier (and also excellent) book 'Great Western Branch Line Termini' (OPC), I've worked out how the terminus would scale into 4mm:

The grey grid lines represent 1ft spacings, with the red lines showing how the entire station area could be comfortably accommodated on 3 4'x2' baseboards without requiring any compression at all.

Definitely one to consider for the future. And having actually got into reading a detailed line history like this I am now beginning to understand the reason people choose to model a real location rather than something made up.

Common crossing

My first scratch-built common crossing. (Well actually it's my second, but the first one ended up in the bin after some over-zealous 'adjustments' with the soldering iron!).

In the end I found the best instructions to follow were those on EM Gauge Society manual sheet 1.2.0 (4). The crossing is assembled as a unit, soldered to brass strips at the timber positions (these still require trimming on the photos).

Here's the completed assembly:


And here it is temporarily in situ:


Obviously we'll see how successful I have actually been once I've built the whole turnout and I can actually run some stock through it!

Turnout wiring - 3

I'm just wondering... is the reason for the conventional 2 pieces of copperclad on adjacent timbers at the heel of the switches and 3 pieces at the crossing so that each rail can be soldered to a different piece of copperclad to avoid having to try and solder both/all the rails to the same small piece of copperclad??? Anyone?

Turnout wiring - 2

Here's a revised (and clearer!) version of my turnout wiring diagram. I realised that only the frog/crossing itself need actually be switched, not the rails beyond the turnout.

The blue line represents the wire/rails that will be switched depending on the way the turnout is set. The brown colour represents the copper-clad strips: one piece connecting the rails of the crossing, and one connecting the switch/closure rail with the adjacent stock rail (no need for multiple copper-clad strips at each location is there?).

Insulated rail joints are shown in black - all other rail joints will be represented cosmeticly.

Rather than trying to pass the dropper wires up through the sleepers/copper-clad, solder on top and file flat (which I tried and found that filing the joint flat basically removes the joint!!), the wires will come up immediately adjacent to the timber/copper-clad and be bent over and soldered on top of the copper-clad where it protrudes slightly from beneath the rail. (This will be on the non-viewing side of the rail to hide it from view, and further disguised with the general dirt, grass and weeds that will encroach on much of the trackwork anyway).