Building a turntable

[highpeak]

My big purchase at the recent show in Springfield (Agawam for those who need to be geographically correct) was a turntable kit by Custom Model Railroads.

My layout, which is a sort of US equivalent to the British BLT, will feature steam and single-ended diesel engines, both of which will require turning. The turntable will not be at the front of the layout, so automatic indexing and reliable operation will be very important. I wouldn't say operations was my main interest in the hobby, but I don't want operating sessions to be a source of frustration.

I did quite a bit of research into the various options and on the strength of some favorable blog entries selected the turntable kit made by CMR, which will be paired up with a New York Railway Supply drive. This is a fairly expensive combination and represents my big spending spree for the year. There isn't much likelihood of being tempted to buy a load of RTR stuff for the Maine Central, and on a small layout there isn't the need for huge fleets of motive power, so the budget is probably not going to be busted.

The CMR kit that I selected makes up into a 90 foot turntable with a concrete pit. I realize this is probably a bit big and modern for a MEC branch line, and that in all likelihood the railroad would have built a wye to turn engines as they got bigger than the early turntables, but I don't have the space for that, so a turntable it had to be and one capable of handling a 2-8-2.

I ordered the kit at the show and was impressed with the delivery, exactly as promised. The kit was very well packed in a stout cardboard box inside a bigger, even sturdier cardboard box. It would have taken some effort to damage the contents, which are laser-cut acrylic sheets.

The kit comes with comprehensive instructions and an admonishment to take your time, excellent advice. I started making the pit, which consists of a base plate and pit walls which are built from sections. I carefully sanded each part to make sure there was no cusp from the laser cutting, and checked the work carefully to make sure the wall was remaining vertical. Placing the wall sections over the alignment rods gave me a bit of a flashback to the days of Bayko, anybody remember that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayko

The pit wall sections:

The sections fit over styrene rods, some care needed to make sure the rod is vertical.

Twenty four pit wall sections later:

 

The next task is sanding and filling any minor imperfections in the wall. So far I have enjoyed building this kit, it seems to be well thought out and the instructions are exemplary. My only thought is that some of the components (e.g., railings) might have been better made as etched components. CMR's core competency is laser cutting, and they are very good at it, but there are limits to what the technology can do. It's a common problem, the resin caster will cast everything, the etcher will generally etch when sometimes a casting might be better and so on. I would imagine though that mixing technologies might drive up the cost.

 

[highpeak]

Yes, the instructions make it quite clear how to offset the joints when you build the wall. The kit is very high quality, and a lot of manufacturers would do very well to study the instructions, detailed, well-organized, well-written.

[highpeak]

The pit is now in a fill-sand repeat until smooth cycle so I turned my attention to the bridge. Which the basic construction looks fine, this is an area where the kit is a little crude.

I suppose the gap could be made to go away with a thin strip of styrene, but I decided to add a representation of a flange or gusset or whatever the civil engineers would call it using some 10 thou and the Archer rivet decals.

I decided to give the rivets a coat of paint to see how they will look when finished, it wasn't easy to see how much relief there would be without paint. I think they come out pretty well.

 

One component that will definitely have to be replaced is the handrail. It scales up to something like an 8x8 which is a bit on the hefty side. I could dodge the issue altogether and expose my crews to a fall into the pit, the turntable at St. Johnsbury didn't seem to have any handrails, nor did any of the armstrong tables. I quite like the look of the handrails that Vector Cut offers http://www.vectorcut.com so I'll use those.

[doctor quinn]

Very nice Adrian, I was lucky enough to see the one at St J in use to turn a Canadian American Railway GP35 a few years ago.

 

Nick

[highpeak]

I forged ahead with the work on Saturday evening and assembled the bridge. I always like to see what the finished product is going to look like, and being able to see the bridge spin around in the pit is an incentive to keep working, even though there is a lot of work to do before the job is done. So this is a "can you tell what it is now" picture.

Progress will now slow because I didn't care that much for the control cab and decided to make one from scratch that would at least vaguely resemble a cab on the table at Waterville or Bangor. It's by no means a replica, just something a bit different from the kit.

Of course, the whole thing is a bit of a fiction because the turntables at the end of most MEC branch lines were armstrong types that wouldn't handle anything bigger than a ten wheeler. Where bigger power was introduced the table was usually removed and a wye used to turn engines, snow plows and so on. There were some exceptions, but this table is really too big and modern for a MEC branch line. I don't have the space for a wye though, so a table it must be.