CP Scarborough Harbor Branch Line - HO Scale

[tetters]

More on my decent into madness. I decided that I wanted to construct the yard ladder as one single piece of track work. Knowing I wanted two inch track centers was the easy part. Getting it straight and true while keeping it all in gauge would be the tricky and time consuming part. I also thought it would be smart and economical to use the three turnouts I planned to use. It saved me a ton of work as the skeletons for them were already made, I'd just modify them slightly to work with my idea.

So this is where it all began. I used a piece of masonite board as my work area and glued some track templates on to it. I marked the lines every two inches apart and basically lined up the centers of each turnout. Thus a jig is born. In this picture you can see the curved # 6 at the top of the ladder.



Then I removed the left stock rail off of each turnout. I used one large piece of 3' rail as the stock rail which would run from the top of the ladder all the way to the bottom. One of the critical elements was to make sure I carefully lined up and filed out the bottom of rail inside the stock rail in order to allow the point rail of each turnout to fit snug againts it. Once I marked the location of these areas that little job was done with my trusty bench top belt sander.









So this is as far as I've made it in two nights. Will remove the excess tie length at some point. A good way to do it is chop most of it off with some rail cutters and use the belt sander to quickly and easily move down the line. I also have to remember to leave the throwbar ties longer. I don't want to accidentally cut them off.

I figure, I'm not going to push myself too hard on this. I am really shooting for some pretty solid track work here.

EDIT - I couldn't just leave the those ties so I trimmed them down...last one tonight, promise.