Track Gangs hard at it

Willsboro track work complete

I finally managed to get out into the shed again this weekend. The first task was to pre-weather the turnout and diamond cross over that I had made. Once the pre-weathering was completed and paint was let to dry, it was onto one of the most enjoyable parts of building a railroad, the track work.

After a few hours of planning and modifications to the track layout, the town is now built.

Willsboro is a paper mill town and the primary reason for the railroad in this area is paper. The town boats a 2 track pulp wood unloading area, 2 tracks for tack cars for plant, 2 tracks for finished product such as cardboard boxes, then another track for news print rolls. As the paper mill is large it also has its own power station. As such, a power station needs loads of coal, so 2 tracks for coal. Then on the other side of the main line is storage tracks to store box cars for the paper mill.

See the following pics.

Track power and turnout machines are yet to be installed. That's a job for next weekend.

Stay tuned for the next update.

Diamond build

Hand Laid Diamond

As the town of Fairhaven has a large glass manufacturing facility, the town needs a diamond cross over to enable additional locations to set our cars. As I'm using hand laid FastTracks #6 turnouts, none of the Atlas code 55 diamonds match the geometry of the FastTracks #6's. Therefore I needed to make my own. I had built a diamond 12 months ago using the paper template and used the slotted rail technique . This worked fairly well until I dropped the diamond into my lap and bent it and effectively destroyed 4 hours of work. This time I used the normal method to build the diamond by bending the 2 outside rails and building from there. Attached are the pictures of the diamond and it turned out nicely. The paper template has extra check rails draw on it, however, I dont think they are needed so did not install them. I used an Atlas Code55 diamond as a guide.

Here are the pictures of the completed product.

I have also added the wooden ties to the last set of 18 turnouts that I built. Here are a few examples.

Now to weather them and get back to track laying.

Milestone 100

The end of the turnout build

Today marked the completion of the turnout build.
Today I made turnout 100, 101 and 102. (This include the 37 hand laid turnouts on my last layout).

Now to cut the frog gaps, install the wood ties, pre weather and then install.

The layout will have 87 turnouts on it. 65 of those 87 are hand laid. Only the staging has Atlas Code 55 #5s installed.

I have 1 diamond to make then the track laying can start.

Stay tuned for the install.