Hello,
Have any of you fine folks tried this?
Staging that is a basically a large sheet of plywood that slides on drawer hardware to put trains on/off differernt tracks?
My worries are:
1) the drawer moves too fast and jostles the trains (N scale) and knocks them all to Hades
2) good alignment with the entry/departure tracks on either end.
One thought is that I could some-how rig a geneva wheel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_Cross_mechanism ) mechanism that could motroize the whole thing with good alignment of tracks, but 1) it might be too hard on the trains (#1 above) and two might be so darned complicated to set up it's not worth the effort
thanks
I believe that there was an article in MR that showed various methods of staging. They had sector plates and I think one design which was basically a transfer table for entire trains. I don't remember how the transfer table was mounted. I think they addressed the question of track alignment.
So far as your derailing concern goes, I believe the ideas they had were manually operated, so any derailments caused by the movement of the table get classified as "operator error".
John Signor wrote about his manually-operated version:
Railroading in a drawer Model Railroader, December 2000
Layout Design GalleryLayout Design Special Interest Group
Raised on the Erie Lackawanna Mainline- Supt. of the Black River Transfer & Terminal R.R.
Here's an earlier thread on the same subject, with lots of pics.
Svein
I use a removable sliding drawer on my HO layout to provide access to an inaccessable area. Picture below shows the sawmill complex installed on a removable sliding drawer.
Wow, that's a good thread. thanks.
Well, here is the "mac daddy" of sliding drawer staging: the MEGA-DRAWER on Silicon Valley Lines layout:
29-page PDF document overview of the MEGA-DRAWER:http://www.siliconvalleylines.com/downloads/SVL_MegaDrawer.pdf
MEGA-DRAWER page with photos on the SVL website:http://www.siliconvalleylines.com/benchwork/megadrawer.html
They also have a helix that hurts my brain to comprehend. Jamie
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That's definetly the 'mac daddy'
thanks for the info.