I decided to have a think about making track. I have a number of reference photos, including the excellent one of Corsican track kindly uploaded by  5&9 models earlier in the blog. So, timber sleepers, medium weight flat bottom rail held down with track screws.

Firstly sleepers. These are cut from some old mahogany, pretty hard but it saws well.  A scale 2.1 m long which seems like a reasonable average from the info I can find.

Track screws next. Sometimes called rail screws or screwed spikes. These are still manufactured by several companies so I was able to get dimensioned drawings. Some experiments later I came up with the idea of using a peco track pin with a 0.5 mm cube of styrene glued to the head. This is the first batch with a coat of primer. Some rejects but enough to play with.

Peco trackpins are 0.4 mm dia. There is no chance of them going through mahogany that tough without a pilot hole. However using any sort of hand held drill is a recipe for snapping drill bits at a rate. So I made a drill machine consisting of a linear ball slide mechanism from the bits box with a flexible mini drill drive clamped to it. Here it is sat on the sleeper drilling jig which makes sure that one inner hole is accurately drilled as a reference point.

I painted a bit of scrap 10 mm ply as a test bed. First  sleeper fixed with a track screw on the inside. The rail is peco code 83.  Intended for HO that represents a fairly heavy flat bottom rail, but at 1/50  scale it comes in very close to the drawing I have of typical metre gauge track.  The drill can then make the outer hole and a track screw inserted. The curve is 1 m radius marked out using the bit of string tied to a pencil method.

With the inner rail fixed roller gauges are use to position the outer rail for drilling.

Some pictures of the test track. I have tried a bit of ballasting and rail painting at the lh end. Not particularly happy about those, but I will do tests with other ballasts a few sleepers at a time till I find one I like.

Overall I feel that was a worthwhile test. The track looks right to my eye and the wood sleepers have a more natural variation than plastic ones. Similarly the slight positional variation of the track screws adds to the realism. Price wise it isn’t much more than standard OO track, certainly cheaper than O gauge.