Ramps - Installation Started

After a trip to the timber merchants for 'another' sheet of 5mm plywood, I've been able to complete the assembly of all the straight and curved elements of both ramps (3-track and 2-track). That makes a total of 6 curved and 11 straight elements.

A while back I posted about pondering how to commence the ramps from the existing lower level baseboards. In the end I settled for cutting the 12mm plywood of the baseboard and 'bending it upwards' to form the beginnings of a ramp. The one I've done is lower level Baseboard-A, where this connects to a 3-track ramp.

In the end, this turned out better than I had hoped, and the baseboard cross-members provided additional support from which to 'pack' under the ramp section. If this all seems a little completed or implausible, the following pictures should help.

I think that, with a little lick of paint, it will blend in very well to the existing baseboard.

The unpainted 'tongue' sticking out of the upper end of the new ramp section is for attaching to the first element of the ramp proper. As usual (for me anyway) this will be a bolted connection to allow disassembly for final painting and any future removal requirements (eg: track repairs?).

You can see how the first ramp section will fit in the next picture.

The gradient is ~2.5% (1 in 40). I installed a quick bit of track to see how my loco fleet coped with the gradient, and had no problems. I could even stop and re-start on the gradient with a substantial trailing load of 8 coaches. The one loco that did struggle was a Bachmann Class 44, which was odd since the Bachmann Class 25 had no problems. Maybe the Class 44 needs a little more weight adding? My guess it that because the weight of the Class 44 is over 8-axles (of which only 4 are powered), this reduced the axle weight on the powered axles.

Ramps

By which I mean those tracks between the Upper (at a nominal 0mm) and Lower (at a nominal -350mm) baseboards. Getting this to work has been something of a challenge. I eventually realised that for this to work the Upper level could not be 'flat', it has to have some slope(s) built into it for the tracks to go 'underneath themselves' at some point.

Drawing the layout of the ramps necessitated knowing the exact location of the Ramp Tracks in relation to the vertical baseboard support structure. This I drew up in Xara DesignerPro as below:

At each vertical support the ramp baseboards are to be split to allow segmented construction and removal as required. Each join will be supported on a small steel shelf angle (pressed steel type) obtained on-the-cheap from B&Q a while back.

With all the 'offsets' from the vertical baseboard support now known I could draw the layout up properly as below. The two views are from opposite ends of the room:

Finally, from the coordinate information in layout drawing and the known locations of the vertical baseboard supports I was able to calculate the height of the ramp tracks above the Lower Level baseboards. That involved quite a complicated Excel Spreadsheet that I made 'fully automatic' in that it will recalculate everything based on the basic input data (makes it simple to change if I want to alter any input data).

In the end I managed to get gradients of 1 in 39 for Connection 1 (3-tracks) and 1 in 46 for Connection 2 (2-tracks). Not bad, and should be suitable for the diesel fleet of locomotives.