Building turnouts in 2mm fine scale which operate smoothly has been a difficult task for me. The first few turnouts which I actually managed to finish looked a bit rubbish and rolling stock kept sticking in the crossing. This almost made me move back to N gauge track but then the 2mm Association released their comprehensive book on turnout construction and operation. After reading through the book several times I began to think of new ways to build the required turnouts for Rannoch. The turnouts on the scenic section will all be built in situ with plastic chairs and sleepers but all the turnouts in the fiddle yard will be copper clad construction for durability.

My previous experiments in copper clad were OK and after a few adjustments allowed rolling stock to pass through smoothly. The problem with previous plans for Rannoch was that almost every turnout in the fiddle yard was unique. For the new plan I have tried to keep all turnouts to a handful of designs. I have managed to re use the same three turnout designs for the whole fiddle yard albeit some are a mirror image. My reasoning behind this was I thought if I could design a jig for each turnout design, I could build each turnout on the workbench then place on the layout when the baseboards are built. Below is the result of a few hours on AutoCad and laser cutting by a small company based in London.

The idea behind these jigs is to glue them to a suitable flat piece of birch ply I have and cut them into individual jigs. This means they are small enough for the workbench and I can turn them around so I am always soldering at the front. Using ply as the material means it won't melt when the soldering iron is near. PCB sleepers will be cut and inserted into the slots. The rail locations are engraved into the surface to allow me to roughly locate them before soldering. I will install some pins to ensure alignment and straightness of the rails. Hopefully building all of the fiddle yard turnouts this way will ensure some sort of uniformity and means I won't have to build them in situ which could get messy.

Something else which has been progressing in AutoCad is the drawing of the station building and signal box. Again, the idea for this will be to laser cut and engrave to produce a kit which should glue together to be painted.

This drawing still has someway to go before I can send it off to the laser cutters but I already had an etch produced for all the windows and doors.

I designed these around two years ago and had them produced around 18 months ago. I am really pleased with the way they turned out considering how fine they are. Some bits go down to 0.15mm! I've got a lot on at work between now and the end of April but hope to have the station building drawings finished and laser cut by May. I should be at the Perth model railway show in June with either a finished building or actually building it from a kit of laser cut parts.

The designs for the baseboards are progressing well too with an estimated build date of around July-August.

Thanks

Martin