Primitive track questions

[mike morley]

Firstly, did standard-gauge stub-points simply fall out of use or were they outlawed?  Also, would my hunch that stub catch/trap points were both more numerous and longer-lived than actual turnouts be correct?

 

Secondly, photographs of plain track with half-round log sleepers are not exactly common but you don't have to look too hard to find a few.  However, I have never seena picture of pointwork with half-round, log sleepers.  Were split logs ever used for pointwork?

 

Finally, how to model such track?

My previous attempt used barbecue skewers for the sleepers (left round.  I'd intended to hide the lower half in slots cut in a suitably thin layer of cork underlay) with small holes drilled drilled to take fine brass pins.  The heads of the pins and the underside of the flat-bottomed rail were heavily tinned and the two sweated together with a seriously hot iron applied to the angle where the web of the rail meets the foot.

That was the theory, anyway.

In practice I found that while thin layers of sheet brass or nickel-silver might sweat readily enough, rail is an entirely different proposition, particularly when there is at least one track gauge in close proximity to channel away a lot of heat.  A lot of joints didnt take at all and even more were extremely weak.  I also found that the amount of heat required and the length of time it had to be applied to achieve even that much resulted in a good few scorched or charred sleepers.

For this attempt I initially considered building the track upside-down, with the iron applied direct to the tinned underside of the rail.  The trouble with that idea was that I'd effectively be building set-track. Instead I thought I' start off the same way, with everything upside-down, but would only solder one rail in place, creating the classic herring-bone,  I'd then turn it the right way up and position it where I wanted it on the layout before using the original heavy sweating method to attach the second rail.   The high failure rate didnt ought to matter this time.  Only a few joints should need to hold for me to be able to gently lift the track without it losing its shape so I could then turn it over and securely solder the rest of the joints from underneath.

I'm not planning anything exotic - just an ancient, little-used siding or two and (possibly) the relevant points and/or trap-point.