building

Weekend progress on Ranuska

First on the workbench this weekend was to get one of the points operating correctly. It turns out that building very tight radius points that operate well is quite a difficult task.

One of my points is located right at the mouth of the tunnel, making it fiddly to work on. It's also quite a tight radius and I was having trouble with the wheels jumping off the track, so the engineering department was called in to take a look.

The foreman first decided to take off one of the point blades and grind it down to a sharper point. This went well until some of the grinding equipment (a piece of sandpaper) snagged the point and bent it into a U shape! Panel beating efforts were unsuccessful. So a new point blade was duly fabricated.

The foreman then noticed that the rebate in the outer track was too big and the point blade wasn't lining up correctly. The maintenance window was extended and the workers set about correcting this. First the rail was built up using solder and...

Ranuska tunnel taking shape

Ranuska has been slowly ticking along. The tunnel has been the focus of my attention lately.

First port of call was to get the track into place. Thanks to my chopper I quickly made up the sleepers. A few test fits later and I glued the track down for good with 24 hour Araldite – 24 hours so that I had some time to get everything lined up before the glue went off. Once that was set I attacked the track with dark gray undercoat.

Now I had the track sorted, it was time to get the tunnel into place.

Before I put the tunnel walls in place, I need to line the inside of the tunnel. I did this with some well-expired Scultamold, that it turns out never set. I also added some small wood brackets to mount the tunnel to.

An engaging build, part 5

Continued from part 4...

An important occasion requires a celebratory train, so two carriages were duly ordered and shipped over to Utrainia, months prior to "the occasion". The carriages were prepared in top secret, first with a coat of deep maroon paint, which unfortunately came out more brown than maroon. Then it was time to name the carriages.

First of all some guidelines were added to the carriage with some masking tape. Then the decal letters were cut out and put in a dish of water to soak for a minute:

Each letter is the...

Ranuska trackwork finished?

After yesterday's amazing effort, I was pretty sure I could knock off the rest of the trackwork today. And indeed I did.

First up was laying the regular track between points; this wasn't too complicated, just a bit fiddly making the outer and inner loops an even gauge. Once that was done I set about laying the inner rails around the beach area:

These are slightly smaller rails that sit inside the regular track. I will fill between the tracks with DAS and scribe in cobblestones. By having the smaller rails on the inside I won't have to worry about keeping the DAS out of the flangeways, and it'll look more like tram track too.

Once that was done, I did an electrical test. This showed up numerous shorts. Each one had to be tracked down and fixed. After half an hour of f...

Ranuska trackwork

Work continues on Ranuska, albeit rather slowly. Somehow the entire week just disappeared in a cloud of work. Yesterday however I managed to squeeze in half an hour to battle once again with Templot; against all odds however I managed to achieve the right combinations of hot keys to get my reverse transition curves all lined up, the spacing between sidings consistent, and the forth turnout into the right place.

Then I printed out the track plan on 9 sheets of paper, stuck them together, and started filing point blades.

Today I got well stuck into it, and by the end of the day I had soldered up four turnouts, and a good deal of the track in between too! I've not run out of blank PCB to mill into sleepers, so that will complicate things somewhat. Perhaps it's an omen, a subtle suggestion that I should instead clean the garage tomorrow, since I spent half an hour searching high and low for my track gauge in there today.

Anyway, here is the current state of the trac...

A tunnel for Ranuska

Around the end of the  Ranuska peninsula, the track passes under a mountain and skirts quite close to the coastline. When the engineers were building the track, they had to dig through a lot of loose rock, and had problems with the hillside above. Since the tunnel was so close to the surface, the engineers built up a brick and concrete lining where the tunnel broke through. The resulting tunnel has become something of an icon for the area.

So here is the area where my tunnel will go, with the sanatorium perched above. It is so close to the edge that a tunnel would just look silly, but I want a tunnel. While surfing for ideas I came across the Cinque Terre in Italy, which is a rugged patch of coast line along the Italian Riviera. I found some great looking stone structures that were half tunnel, half rock shelters, so I decided to copy that.