Entry posted by Beardybloke
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Quicker as it would be to simply buy a job lot of flexitrack and run it on the floor, I don’t think that I would receive a great deal of my rental deposit back once I de-ballasted and lifted the track from the carpet when I move out. So, with the safety of my deposit and the longevity of locomotive mechanisms when carpet fibres are concerned in mind, I decided that some baseboards may come in handy.
With a track plan and dimensions to hand, the next stage involved much scribbling and estimation in the back of a work notebook in order to arrive at the total length of softwood and plywood required for the baseboard framing. After taking into account the surviving wood from the demolition of HL2, I took a wander to a certain orange DIY store in the company of a helpful friend with a far bigger car than mine… and after some time, managed to find sufficient straight bits of wood to make up the boards. (Having discovered that I was one length short some time later, after relying on a piece intended for the unbuilt fiddle yard for HL2 which turned out to be propeller shaped, I looked at over a dozen lengths of 2x1 until I found a piece that was actually true)
I won’t send you to sleep with the details, but the boards were of conventional construction with a lap joint screwed and glued at each corner and a cross brace in the middle placed to avoid being in the way of the point motors – even so, I still needed to chisel away one of the end pieces later on once the track had been laid (on an inter-board joint) in order to fit the point motor in place. Oops! Diagonal bracing was added in the same way, with one piece being lower than the others to form the support for the riverbed. The boards at this stage can be seen below:
With the boards intended to be fitted together in multiple ways, a reliable method of precisely locating the baseboards was sought – Station Road Baseboards provided the solution with their 'bullet-type' locating dowels (I couldn’t afford the number of pattern makers’ dowels that I would require – 12 in all!) and some 8mm diameter coach bolts with wingnuts. These are far better than my previous attempt on HL2 which used cheap wooden dowels and smaller bolts with conventional nuts, so once again, I have demonstrated an ability to learn from my cock-ups… it’s the one good thing that can be said for my multiple model railway disasters over the years! I made the decision to fit integral plywood backscenes up to full height to start with, with an eye to possibly cutting them down to match the terrain in the future. The important part was to ensure that a flat, square surface for mating the boards together was available and bitter past experience has taught me that I really couldn’t rely on the softwood to do that. The same was done on the inter-board joints on each scenic side (though far shorter and below track level, obviously!) The boards were clamped together in turn and drilled for both locating dowels and securing bolts, with the 4 boards comfortably fitting together in both configurations.
Copper clad board was cut and glue-gunned into place at the board edges on the curve to use as a starting point and tracklaying commenced from there. Again, the decision to use PCB sleepers (albeit oversized) is another thing that I learned from experience on HL2 along with trimming the rails back sufficiently to make sure that they don’t catch on anything! All rail sections have a separate feed to them (or in a couple of cases of very short lengths are soldered directly together) as I’m not a fan of relying on fishplates for electrical conductivity. At this stage, no decision had been made on couplers (and they’re still being evaluated) so the track was pinned down and the pins left unbent underneath the layout to facilitate the later lifting if it becomes necessary to fit magnets.
Tracklaying progressed quite rapidly, apart from a brief pause to lift a ‘Y’ point and replace it with a RH version to eliminate a dogleg and reverse curve in the goods yard of the station. A couple of the sidings have been left with very rough ends as I’m not sure about fitting wagon turntables in a couple of places yet. Point motors were fitted underneath – mostly Peco as that’s what I’ve standardised on, for good or bad, but a couple of old Hornby ones from my abandoned teenage standard gauge layout have found their way onto the junction points. Polarity switching is provided by the same microswitch method as used on HL2 but with the wooden supports cut to the right height this time rather than bodged with cardboard – see below for the original version from HL2 to get the idea (and once again, I've plagiarised it, and I'm afraid that I can't for the life of me remember who from to thank them – I think that it was on RMweb3). Isolating sections have been fitted to the two arms of the junctions so that the one not in use can be used as a siding if necessary, though some blanking plates for the holes in the backscene may be in order to prevent rogue rolling stock from attempting flight – my Double Fairlie has already tried it once, with limited success…
Below can be seen the station side of the layout with track laid and all droppers fitted underneath – the white patches that may be seen are sticky labels that are patching the point rodding and wire dropper holes that remain from the aforementioned de-doglegging. Some spare stock – a Langley FR Bowsider running on Parkside bogies and a Parkside GVT-style van – were both used for checking the rail joints and clearance on the points as some of the older Peco 009 points (though not the new mainline ones) require some modifications and fettling to the frogs, flangeways and check rails to ensure reliable running. This process hasn’t quite been completed yet, but will certainly be required before any significant running takes place…
You might also notice from the photos that the extra spur running off the front of the boards on the plan doesn't exist on the layout as built - both were deleted as superfluous, especially at £10 per point!
So, with the track laid and mostly wired up (if not to board connectors and switches) I am now nearly at the same stage as HL2 was prior to demolition, but with a much better-constructed set of baseboards and no requirement for a fiddleyard board to make it useable – learning from my mistakes and others’ recommendations (usually after I’d already done it wrong) was rather helpful – the next stage is to finish the wiring and do a bit of test running.
Hopefully when I’ve got it all running, I won’t then pause for two years whilst I just play trains!
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