Duck Under Elemination

[kurtdewald]

Does anyone have any great ideas for a lift out or swinging gate or some other greater design to eliminate the duck under problem I am going to have on my layout. I have a article from the March 1998 MRR Pages 94 and 95, wich show a swinging gate. Just wondering if there are any other articles or how you tackled this same problem.

Thanks, Kurt

[Big_Boy_4005]

[#welcome] to the forum.

There are only a few basic options to duck under elimination, short of designing layouts that don't go in front of the door.

The swinging gate is one of the better ones. The others are the lift out, the drop down draw style, and the lift up draw style. The key to any section of movable track is alignment, combined with disaster prevention. Some methods lend themselves to these tasks more easily than others.

The Index of Magazines has a link at the very top of the page, next to the Trains.com logo. The secret is to have access to the magazines once you locate the articles. There have been a number of them on the various concepts that I have mentioned.

The keyword seems to be "hinge". Here are all of the matches for MR.
http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=S&cmdtext=hinge&MAG=MR&output=3&sort=A

[Javern]

i find that piano hinges offer a sturdy mount, i mounted two double track bridges to a narrow plank which was mounted to the layout via piano hinge, this was a swing up. When in the down position i had a locator pin mounted on the other end of plank which mated with a hole on layout, this assured good alignment . Also need to have a couple wire loops to have power to the swingup track.

[Anonymous]

I used two different solutions on my layout. the first is a small area that leads to the electrical panel. I used kitchen cabinet draw hardware to make a section that pulls out and the then lifts out.

the second is a massive lift section build on steel track normally used for barn doors. It still need some work, but will do the trick..

have a look at my layout, one shows the bridge on the lift out section.

http://community.webshots.com/user/nhguy21

Josh

[tutaenui]

I have an L shaped layout one leg of the L is built across a door leading under the house and is used infrequently. My solution was to mount that leg of the L on castors and I just wheel it away when I need to get to the door.

[Anonymous]

There's some good info on removeable sections at the following links:

http://members.shaw.ca/sask.rail/model-book/liftout/liftout.html
http://www.ospreyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/kmr/track/lift01.htm

[BRJN]

If you want to show off a bit, you could build a drawbridge in front of the door and connect it to appropriate track power routing and a motion detector so when somebody walks near the door, the trains stop and the drawbridge goes up. The bridge could stay up until the person gets through the doorway and clears the vicinity. [8D] . Most [8D] .

[daschilling]

I made a simple truss bridge so it would pivot up to provide a walk-through to enter my layout room. the pivot is just off the picture to the lower right.

[NZRMac]

The first stages of my gate on the VSL (my small temporary layout)





The gate is effectively this shape so the ends clear each other when it swings.



Ken.

[Medina1128]

I saw an article on just this thing a few months back. One of the safety features they incorporated was to wire the block that the liftout/swingout is in so that the liftout/swingout powers the tracks adjacent to it, so that if the liftout/swingout is open, then power to the tracks leading to it is killed, preventing a train from even getting to the "canyon".

[leighant]

This is a facetious and unhelpful answer to a serious question.
If you have a problem with ducks, put an alligator in your duck pond.
The ducks will very quickly cease to be a problem.

I hope some of the other guys were more helpful. Looks like they gave you some good ideas. Happy railroading.

[Medina1128]

SO, what do you do about the ensuing gator problem? If you're from Florida, I already know the answer... Hurricanes!