I must be crazy

It seems that I just can't get enough of hand laid turnouts! Which is odd, because it's a pretty tedious process making them. And yet, here I am, a month later building a crossover for Raparapa. Now that trains are running, the Operations Dept has been fairly vocal about how inefficient the current system is. With a small crossover at Raparapa, they argue, trains on the second track would no longer need to reverse half the length of the country to get back onto the first main line. A fairly compelling argument I have to admit, so with that in mind I fired up the computer and drew up a template for the crossover.

Templot to the rescue again, which means about 3 minutes of drawing the turnouts, another 3 hours adjusting the sleeper spacing in 50,000 different dialog boxes, and then another 3 hours trying to convince it that just because I have a black and white printer, doesn't mean I shouldn't be forbidden from changing any of the export options. But at long last I ha a 1:1 template printed out on heavy photo paper. On this I marked the spots for PCB sleepers and stuck on wooden sleepers in the remaining spots.

Some more PCB sleepers were run up on my homemade jig; this time I got the knack of it and ran up a bunch of extras. I then cut the sleepers to length and superglued them into place:

That was enough for one night.

Today I made good progress and by dinner time I had all the outer rails done, and two of the point blades as well, with a third filed and ready to be installed.

There was a bit of fiddling and jiggling to get the curves smooth and everything into place, but I got there in the end.

So now I have a nice flowing #8 crossover, which means that trains can cross from one main line to the other, without having to slow down too much. This should give me quite a bit more flexibility, for instance it will let me have a passenger train at Raparapa Station, while a freight train crosses. Tomorrow I will paint the turnout, while the maintenance dept takes over Raparapa to splice in the new track.