Following on from the testing of the left-hand point that I put up on my blog a few weeks ago, I have in the meantime added cosmetic plastic chairs.

What I should really have done, is put spacers between the copper clad sleepers and the underside of the rail, which I have done before, but I didn't do it in this particular case. It's somewhat easier, I find, when building the point, if the rails can be soldered direct to the sleepers, but you do pay the price later, when you come to add cosmetic half chairs, to give it a semblance of bullhead track.

I have used plastic P4 Track Company chairs (now marketed by C&L). These are cut in half and then cut down in height. Both the outer half and the inner half need to be cut down, but when using OO and RP25 flanges, the inner half chair needs to be cut down rather more than if you were doing this in P4 (which I have also done). The outer half chair, which also has the key detail, also needs to be reduced in height, but not by so much.

The purpose of this test today was to ensure that typical loco flanges wouldn't foul the inner chairs, so I used a Bachmann pannier, a Hornby Peckett and some other locos that use etched chassis and RP25 profile wheels.

Bachmann pannier starting the testing off (this loco will eventually get converted to P4, but I have another Bachmann pannier in OO that will eventually run over these points):

Hornby Peckett:

Mercian X Class Peckett 'Plantagenet':

Another type of Peckett. This is a scratchbuilt model of 'Marcia' from the K&ESR, built many years ago by a friend of mine, and currently in my care:

This photo shows just how small 'Marcia' is, compared with the Hornby W4, which itself is pretty small:

Now that this testing has been satisfactorily concluded, the next steps will be to add cosmetic chairs to a copper clad 'Barry Slip' that I bought from Gordon S recently, which was surplus to his requirements, and complete the track layout design for the new OO shunting layout.