I know its been a while since my last post so lets see if I can catch up with activities on the layout over the last two months. On the 7th of January I finished laying the peice of point work you can see below. This piece of track work set the tone for the next two months as the next day I decided it was wrong and took it up and relayed it.
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| The offending track work that started off two months of laying track then pulling it and laying it again and again and... |
By the 15th January we had layed most of the loops and the fiddle yard as can be seen below.
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| Here you can see the three main loops the front two are the main line and the inner loop is the preserved line |
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| Here is the fiddle yard. Looks like I miscalculated the length of the little sidings coming off the preserved line. I predict some track relaying in the near future. |
In order to get more work done we decided to start working on the layout on Wednesday night as well as the usual Thursday nights, so on the 25th January it was decided that the mainline should be relayed with concrete sleepered track. So up came the mainline track on the front of the layout that was layed during the open weekend in December.
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| Here's the team hard at it. Not quite sure what it is that they are hard at? |
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| Among the clutter you can see the newly layed concrete sleeper track. |
Also we decided to make some changes to the fiddle yard. We got rid of those tiny little sidings coming off the preserved line, swapped the points over to make the siding come off the other side of the preserved line which meant we could link them up making another loop for the fiddle yard.
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| The tiddly little sidings have gone and preserved line now has its own storage loop |
Now that we've finished (or so we thought) laying track on the lower boards, we started to think about the depot board. This is when we hit our first major snag. The curved incline track up to the depot that I had designed was found to be too tight a curve and too steep an incline. OOPS! Well it looked good on the plan. This meant a total redesign of the depot board. It was also suggested that make the entrance track to the depot be turned into a branch line which would mean creating a small upper fiddle yard board above the main fiddle yard.
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| This is the first redesign of the depot board |
With the board redesigned we started work on building the incline.
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| This is us working out the angle of the incline |
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| Various blocks and supports temporarily hold up the incline as Jem starts work on the supports for the depot board |
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| This is Jem and Peter working on the supports for the depot board |
After having messed around with the incline we found that we still couldn't get the slope of the incline right and we realised that the point at bottom of the incline had to be moved back to allow a long shallower slope. This would mean moving all the point work at the bottom of the incline back by about a foot. So much for track laying being finished on the lower boards. It was around this time that we found out that the two mainline tracks that had recently been relayed with concrete sleepered track had been layed too close together. So that was more track that had to be pulled up and relayed. AARRGGHH!!!
Well as the would say on Top Gear, on that bombshell it is time to end; for tonight anyway.
More trials and tribulations soon.
