Making a start.

[Jayk]

   It's been a while! Longer than I realised in fact. But have got back in to the swing of things and progress has been made.

 

   The track is now complete! The two turnouts on the lower half still need to be plumbed in but that's a job for the coming week. Rather than an omega loop, which I'm terrible at making, I'm going to try the zig-zag for accepting the greater travel distance in the slide switch compared with the turnout. I'd intended for the top-most track to extend all the way to the right hand edge but I ran out of rail and since this is purely for testing and checking the clearances for the curves I want to use I'm not going to fiddle around extracting the 26cm needed from the power bus. Before realising I needed / should check the clearances I had more rail than I needed so decided it would make for a rather spiffing way to distribute the power along the length. Oops.

 

   While I was advised that I could use Templot for the checking of clearances it wasn't particularly practical since you have to enter full size data which it then converts down, fine in most cases but since I'm mixing 2mm and N gauge stuff and not being certain that the models are 100% scale accurate it was just easier to do it this way. The good news is that it fits!

 

Just.

 

   The stock used is currently sitting on N gauge wheelsets so the first head on shot is with them pushed as close together as possible and the second is with them as far apart as possible. When running on 2mm wheelsets it should be somewhere in the middle. But this is the absolute worst case scenario as the vast majority of stuff I'm interested in running is not going to be longer than 64' and therefore won't get this close.