A quick stub point
It took a while for the early railway companies to decide on the best design for points / switches / turnouts. Personally I've always liked the "stub point" design in which the running rails move to set the road, rather than the typical blades. Perhaps it's a design for sleepy sidings rather than high speed main lines:
A broken PECO streamline point seemed an ideal starting point to add a stub point to the layout:
Pulling off the blades was therapeutic for the eight seconds it took, and cutting through the running rails was quick and easy with a mini-tool. It's actually a rotary tool used by nail technicians to work on nail extensions. I bought it for around £7 on eBay, and it's been an excellent buy. I hoped a tool designed for work on delicate fingers would be useful for delicate modelling work, and it does have very manageable slow lower speeds. It's the first tool I've had that actually lets me cut and grind rails accurately. I wouldn't want to cut through massive sheets of brass with it, but it's perfect for softer materials.
The last few inches of the track before the stub point aren't glued to the baseboard so the flexible track can move from side to side to match up with each road:
Control is by a coffer stirrer super-glued to the front sleeper of the flexitrack. I haven't decided whether to power the sidings or use rope shunting, so I'll probably do both.
The clearances do look as if they were inspired by Triang Series 3 track. Leaving a couple of centimetres of the blades superglued to the sleepers would produce a more realistic model with less flexitrack movement and smaller gaps between the rails.
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