City scene continues to take shape

A month since my last update on the city scene! Yikes. Progress continues in a haphazard fashion, broken here and there by trips to Christchurch. A while back my wooden sleeper stock arrived, ready for cutting and gluing. After a few misadventures I decided the best way to assemble them was:

• Print out a full size template.
• Coat with spray on adhesive.
• Place the turnout over the template and mark where the PCB sleepers are. Hopefully they line up with the sleepers on the template! Often I found they didn't which made things interesting.
• Remove the turnout.
• Place the stripwood on the template, trim to length, press into the glue.
• Rinse and repeat.
• Once all done, stick the turnout to the ties.

Sticking the turnouts to the sleepers proved challenging... since all the turnouts were now soldered together into one continuous run, there was a lot of bits to glue. I did a good job on one side, and a terrible job on the other – the superglue went everywhere and ended up solidly gluing half the turnout blades to the track. Hmm.

When I started piecing together the first few turnouts I'd made, I quickly decided that they weren't up to standard, so ended up dismantling and rebuilding them using Templot generated templates. Some people just love torturing themselves! However all that said it only took a couple of hours and the result is a vastly improved alignment.

Somewhere along the way I went through and gapped each circuit board sleeper, and used my nice new fret saw to gap the track. Some quick checks with the multimeter ensured there were no short circuits.

Track Base

While browsing the local Mitre10, I came across six packs of cork tiles for $30. I decided these would make a good base for my track and so set about making a suitable base.

Another challenge was making sure the track heights matched. I'd used some fairly thin PCB material, however the concrete sleeper track that I have was quite a bit thicker. So I made up some shims out of cardboard which made things the same height.

Obviously I still need to trim the tracks to the right length!

Then there was a mammoth gluing session, wherein I stuck down all the track to the cork. This was one of the places where the gluing went very wrong!

The problem with fast setting glue is it doesn't give you much working time. So there was a lot of very fast gluing and pinning going on.

But I did got there in the end!

With the track down the hard part was over (ish). Now it was time to paint the track, since nothing on a railway is shiny! (Except maybe in Japan).

I used my nice new Vallejo urethane tinted undercoat which sticks well and sprays really nicely. It quickly coated all the sleepers and made everything a good grungy colour.

The current state of play is that I'm busy getting all the "not pointwork" trackwork connected up to the points. This sounds easy but it can be rather fiddly trying to ensure that the curves are all smooth, and with the international shortage of code 55 track, I've run out of rail joiners, which makes the job even more difficult!

I am rather looking forward to having this module done. It's a lot of complicated track, and seems to be taking an eternity to complete. Hopefully the end result will be well and truly worth it though!