G
Guest
·Rail track construction 101
This article is intended half as a record of how the Brooklands rail track was constructed and half as a guide as to how to build one. As with any track construction project, vast amounts of patience and dedication are needed, as well as a healthy dose of crying out "Whyyyy?!" and suppressing the desire to burn the wretched thing for all the trouble it's caused.
Firstly, we took stock of the boards we had and worked on figuring out how they were going to fit together. I should say right away that making a multi-section rail track is a pain and added significantly to the difficulty of the entire project. If you can get away without making it in sections, I'd advise it.
The first thing to do was fitting the different boards to each other securely. To connect the boards we first bought a length of solid metal rod a few mm in diameter and then a hollow tube that it just fit inside. Cutting these into lengths we drilled small pairs of holes in the connecting faces of the boards and sunk the tube in one side, the pin in the other to make a socket and pin joint. These stopped the boards from shifting. Once those were installed, we added a number of pre-made catches bought from a hardware store to lock the boards securely together.
That done, it was now time to mark out the track layout. Three lanes were chosen as was the case on some of the original tracks. These were drawn in pencil by myself, each lane 3 inches apart, and the corners marked using a nail and pencil on a piece of string. This less than perfect method lead to a couple of slight miscalculations! I marked fastening points every six inches down the straights and every three inches on the corners.
This done, it was now time to lay the rail itself. O-gauge Pico rail seemed to be fairly close the original rail used. After much trial and error, we settled upon the following method: first a crosshead screw was screwed firmly into the board, and then by use of a high-power soldering gun solder was melted onto the top of the screw. The rail was then held in place with a pair of pliers while two soldering guns applied heat to the screw, melting the solder and letting the rail settle. While this seems a lot of heat to apply, we found the rail conducted the heat away very quickly and it was quite hard to get the solder molten!
We worked out way around the track by this method, laying the rails one at a time around the track. As you can imagine, with two people wielding soldering guns and another trying to hold the track still with pliers it was somewhat complicated to get right! At the corners we simply hand bent the rail into the right shape to be soldered down. At the tightest loop I realised I'd somehow gotten the curve wrong with my pencil-on-a-string and it was rather tight. Too late to change it, we went ahead and soldered it down anyway. At each join between a section we drilled a hole down through the track next to the rail and soldered a thick wire to the side of the rail, left dangling below the track for now.
Once that laborious task was done (took weeks, not a fast process…
it was time to add the lower wire that carries the positive current. After some experimenting to find where we could get suitably thick copper wire that wasn't braided we hit upon the power cable from a dead cooker. Enter me, a pair of wire cutters, and a long, long time spent stripping out the central earth wire from the flat cable until we had enough to go round the track three times. This, thankfully, was somewhat easier. Nailing in flat headed carpet tacks 3/8 of an inch to the right of the rail, level with the places where the rail was fixed down, we then laid a blob of solder atop each tack as before and needed only a single soldering gun to heat the solder up enough to fix the wire down firmly.
Again, a hole was drilled down through the board and a second braided wire connected that fed down to underneath the board. The hanging wires were now screwed into commercially bought connector blocks, so that they could be plugged together when the track was clipped together to ensure the current flowed from section to section smoothly.
Now it was time to paint the surface of the track. We used paint with a high sand content, which dried incredibly rough. After going around the track with a scalpel, scraping any paint off the top of the copper wire which had covered it, the track was now almost finished. In a few places the solder holding the rail in place had to be filed lower to let the guides go down the rail smoothly, then finally with the addition of standard transformers and power supplies (notably without brakes) the track was ready for use.
Hopefully the above account will inspire a few of you to try and build one yourselves, where you will discover the true depth of pain and suffering these simple steps entail!
Rich
This article is intended half as a record of how the Brooklands rail track was constructed and half as a guide as to how to build one. As with any track construction project, vast amounts of patience and dedication are needed, as well as a healthy dose of crying out "Whyyyy?!" and suppressing the desire to burn the wretched thing for all the trouble it's caused.
Firstly, we took stock of the boards we had and worked on figuring out how they were going to fit together. I should say right away that making a multi-section rail track is a pain and added significantly to the difficulty of the entire project. If you can get away without making it in sections, I'd advise it.
The first thing to do was fitting the different boards to each other securely. To connect the boards we first bought a length of solid metal rod a few mm in diameter and then a hollow tube that it just fit inside. Cutting these into lengths we drilled small pairs of holes in the connecting faces of the boards and sunk the tube in one side, the pin in the other to make a socket and pin joint. These stopped the boards from shifting. Once those were installed, we added a number of pre-made catches bought from a hardware store to lock the boards securely together.
That done, it was now time to mark out the track layout. Three lanes were chosen as was the case on some of the original tracks. These were drawn in pencil by myself, each lane 3 inches apart, and the corners marked using a nail and pencil on a piece of string. This less than perfect method lead to a couple of slight miscalculations! I marked fastening points every six inches down the straights and every three inches on the corners.
This done, it was now time to lay the rail itself. O-gauge Pico rail seemed to be fairly close the original rail used. After much trial and error, we settled upon the following method: first a crosshead screw was screwed firmly into the board, and then by use of a high-power soldering gun solder was melted onto the top of the screw. The rail was then held in place with a pair of pliers while two soldering guns applied heat to the screw, melting the solder and letting the rail settle. While this seems a lot of heat to apply, we found the rail conducted the heat away very quickly and it was quite hard to get the solder molten!
We worked out way around the track by this method, laying the rails one at a time around the track. As you can imagine, with two people wielding soldering guns and another trying to hold the track still with pliers it was somewhat complicated to get right! At the corners we simply hand bent the rail into the right shape to be soldered down. At the tightest loop I realised I'd somehow gotten the curve wrong with my pencil-on-a-string and it was rather tight. Too late to change it, we went ahead and soldered it down anyway. At each join between a section we drilled a hole down through the track next to the rail and soldered a thick wire to the side of the rail, left dangling below the track for now.
Once that laborious task was done (took weeks, not a fast process…
it was time to add the lower wire that carries the positive current. After some experimenting to find where we could get suitably thick copper wire that wasn't braided we hit upon the power cable from a dead cooker. Enter me, a pair of wire cutters, and a long, long time spent stripping out the central earth wire from the flat cable until we had enough to go round the track three times. This, thankfully, was somewhat easier. Nailing in flat headed carpet tacks 3/8 of an inch to the right of the rail, level with the places where the rail was fixed down, we then laid a blob of solder atop each tack as before and needed only a single soldering gun to heat the solder up enough to fix the wire down firmly.Again, a hole was drilled down through the board and a second braided wire connected that fed down to underneath the board. The hanging wires were now screwed into commercially bought connector blocks, so that they could be plugged together when the track was clipped together to ensure the current flowed from section to section smoothly.
Now it was time to paint the surface of the track. We used paint with a high sand content, which dried incredibly rough. After going around the track with a scalpel, scraping any paint off the top of the copper wire which had covered it, the track was now almost finished. In a few places the solder holding the rail in place had to be filed lower to let the guides go down the rail smoothly, then finally with the addition of standard transformers and power supplies (notably without brakes) the track was ready for use.
Hopefully the above account will inspire a few of you to try and build one yourselves, where you will discover the true depth of pain and suffering these simple steps entail!
Rich
