Sunday, October 25, 2015

Painting rail

A short progress report. 

I have started to paint the rails. But running out of the old and proven Floquil Grimy Black, and since no more of that is to be had, I had to find a suitable substitute. I went for Vallejo acrylic Model Color, #168 Black grey. A little darker than the grimy black perhaps, but it will do fine.

This is just a first step. Dirt and rust will follow so the unpainted spots, which can be seen in the picture, do not matter at this point. Also, there is paint on the rail tops which I will remove later.


Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The Ceremonial Last Spike

The ceremonial last spike has been driven in. The event was witnessed by Sir Topham Hatt and duly photographed...



...not!

But the last spike has really been driven, although the event was not that grand, but like this:


Monday, October 19, 2015

Rail on siding spiked

All the rail on the siding has been spiked, and rail joiners have been fitted.


So now a car can roll all the way down to the poor man's bumper.


Friday, October 9, 2015

Lengthening the stock rails

When I started out to spike the rails on the other (left) side of the turnout I remembered that I had made simulated rail joints in both stock rails of the turnout, close to their ends. I had notched the rail heads and added rail joiners for added visual interest. This was when the turnout was just supposed to be a display item. You can see this in the picture below.



When laying the next pieces of rail I would either get a new joint just a few scale feet further away, or have to make that joint invisible. I did not want either of that. So I decided to make those fake cuts real cuts and lay the new rail starting from there.

So the rail joiners were pried loose and the rails cut. But once I had removed the spikes from the now loose pieces of rail, they were still stuck.

Bugger! I had forgot that it was here that I had soldered the feeder wires to the rails! And I had managed to hide theme so well that even I missed them. Well, the feeders were cut off easily enough and the rail pieces finally came off. Like here (you can see the copper colored feeders coming up between the ties).



But now I had a new problem. I had to get the stock rails electrically connected again. I did not want to attempt getting new feeders in from below at this point, so I instead decided to solder the next pieces of rails to the stock rails. Any ugly looking soldering would be hidden by the rail joiners.

Here new rails have been soldered in place.


Not that bad after all. I should have tried for a new invisible joint to begin with, rather than going this tedious route!

With rail joiners and tie plates in place we are ready and can proceed with the rail spiking proper.


Sunday, October 4, 2015

Adding hardware

No work done on the layout for a long time, mainly due to a lack of parts. One parcel with tie plates, spikes and other things never turned up, and apparently got lost somewhere in transit. It took me some time to realize and accept that, order new stuff and wait for the second parcel to come through. It eventually did, and now I can continue spiking track!

But first I added some more hardware to the turnout. Not because it actually needed any, but since I could not resist the heftier look.

First I replaced the simple gauge plate I had made out of plain styrene strip with a properly bolted plate from Right-O-Way.


Then I added a second throw bar, also from RoW. The throw bar is a two piece assembly, which you CA together, with a piece of paper or tissue between the pieces to make them electrically insulated from each other. Here are the two pieces before the excess CA-soaked paper has been cut away.



And here the throw bar has been put in place.
  

Next I painted the new parts with grimy black...
 


... and applied some weathering powder.