Hi all,

well whilst i am waiting for the jigs to arrive i have been making up lengths of easitrac.

For those that haven't seen it before i will give a quick run down on whats what.

The bits needed are as follows

• Rail- code 40
• Sleepers - woodern, concret, flatbottom or Bullhead
• time

RAIL.

The rail is avalible in 10m coils or 500mm straights, most people say to use the straights as it easier to bend than to straighten so thats what i have used

SLEEPERS.

The sleepers come on sprues of two and you need two sprues to make a 60ft panel.

TIME.

Well you may all say that this is the obvious one but you do need to take you time to make the panels as it is easy to bend the rail. I know

Putting it all togther.

Well the fist thing is to dress (file) the rial ends or you will end up cutting that chairs to bits. All it takes is a couple of strokes on the end, top, bottome and finally the sides to remove any burrs that are resident on the rail and than slowly thread the rail in to the sleepers.

You can buy a jig to hold the sleepers to make it eaiser to assemble but i choose not too.

I made up 500mm lengths and had the last panel on each length at each end sticking out by two or three sleepers to make it easier to join when it comes down to track laying later on.

As you can see on the pic above, i choose to leave the other side of the track panel on the sprue just to keep things together and less chance of me loosing things. Now you may have also noticed that the middle section of the tack length, the sleepers are held apart by the sprues and the ends are close together. This was one things that i noticed after the 5th panel so i alternated the way side the sprue went on so the panels butted up againts each other and ment that after cutting i didn't then have to push the sleepers further down the rail and then have to fit more on.

I have no doubt that there are people who will have found easier ways of doing it but this is mine and in total it only took me about 15mins to assemble each panel from filling the rail to cutting the sprues off.

A few of you have been requesting a couple of layout pictures so here are my crude (as you may tell i'm not very good with photos ) pictures of the front and rear of the layout. The section of easitrac sleepers in a line on the front will be the headshunt/siding. I'm not usre how long it will be so just experementing at the moment.

cheers

Simon