Golden Valley Route
Ground foam and ballast
Ties dyed, plaster cloth painted, some ground foam added and a little ballast glued down. A 'gravel road can also be seen. The dark brown road will later be an asphalt road. right now I just to make sure no white spots remain.
The gravel road has been sprinkled with WS fine buff
Tracks
Tieplates (www.proto87.com) glued using CA glue to Micro Engineering Code83 rails
Rail + tieplates glued down
I also glued on some fishplates (joint bars from proto87), and used a sharp knife to scribe the rail suggesting rail lengths of 39ft
Here I have used PS D&RGW building brown to simulate rust (this is a spur, mainline will be painted roof brown...)
Handlaid turnout
I gave up using tieplates on this one. The reason is that I'm using the tongues as studs for the pickup shoe (when running in 3R mode). The tieplates (metal) would short circuit the whole thing since they connects around the tongues
So I just keep-it-simple (well...)
If you zoom the centre of this pics, you'll notice that there is a cut in the tongues to isolate them. They will individually be powered using a relay (driven by one of the tortoise's relayes) More on this later on...
The throwbar is a copperclad PC-tie from fasttrack. It has been isolated to avoid shortcircuits when running in 2R-mode.
I've been drilling the ties and aligning some rail . As you can see, I'm dropping a wire for each rail...
Track spacing
since I will have 3 tracks that have to match when I connect the segments, I opted for a simple jig (styrene...). The track spacing is 6cm
The road crossing
Work has now continued with the road and the Bar mills crossing:
The road is a sheet of Evergreen styrene (0.020) that I applied with latex caulk.
a thin copper wire is providing the slider with something to pick up
Road painted
For the spur, I've added some 'Hayes wheelstops' (Tomar Industries). I'm quite happy with the looks of them
Re-painted road (with less gap between lines...)
16 degree segment
Since I made the inner track a bit too tight for most 2R vehicles on the previous section, I hade to make sure that at least the 'main spur' has a radius big enough to let all engines/cars pass through. Thus the plan to have 2 identical 'A' sections had to be dropped. The new revised version, 'AA' has been prepared:
The short version' of golden Valley now has two 37deg and one 16deg sections that can be laid out as either a 90 degree or 16 degree curve.
New track plan
The basics done
Configuration options
Note that the roads match in both configurations!
Erbert-Herei studs
Here are the studs, soldered to a copper wire.
And a FastTrack twistties #5 (Left), glued in place
The ties are now glued down on the western part of Golden Valley.
It has a #5 wye (bottom TO) and a #5 L (top TO)
As one can see in the pics, the TOs are a bit crooked. It's damn hard to align things with the pukos, ties and cork and copper wires. The 2-railers doing handlaid have a stroll in the park compared to this...
After 3-4 coatings/stains of an india ink wash, the ties get a nice colour:
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