Another trick I have found is to solder droppers to every length of track and point (switch).. Thus the rail joiners only hold and or insulate the joins. No reliance at all on the fish plates carrying power. Although this slows things down, it should protect me from dead spots in the future. The soldered droppers are all connected to the rail close to one end between the fourth and fifth sleeper. This allows the flex track to bend without catching on the solder points.
clean the side of the rail and solder a small tab first then tin the wire and join it to the solder pad.
My standard wiring is black to the outside and red to inside on single lines. However here I have introduced other colours to differentiate between all the different tracks at this point.
Well I guess comparing this picture with a similar one taken of this location,last week shows this leopard is not changing his spots.
Although the permanent track was laid correctly, I fortunately thought a little more about the temporary diversion. In fact something had been worrying me about it for a few weeks. Last night I dreamed about it and understood what I was doing wrong after entering the studio after breakfast.
Because the temporary track was entering the Coal Siding from the Albury end, I needed to swap the sides that the BG and SG travelled. The SG normally travels on the right of the BG but on the diversion it must travel on the left, to align correctly with the track layout at Coal Siding. As the temporary diverge was using second hand Peco Code 100 recovered from an old Layout built in 1985 and pulled down in 95, and stored since. It was not too big a deal. To fix the problem. However it did take me all day to line everything up again.
The diamond had to be slightly relocated to allow the installation of a curved point that was also ex the old layout. First I shimmed up the guard rails and soldered droppers on to the outside rails installed links to the blades and cleaned it up before installing it. Also cut out some broken sleepers and replaced them. Should work fine and tested RP25 and 88 wheels and they were fine.
The curved point allowed the 2 inch centres to be maintained.
Anyway another day and a little bit closer to being connected to Coal Siding Yard.
Cheers
Rod Young
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