Bench work is ready for me to start having fun! My question is: Do all manufacturers keep to the same size for their turnouts? I will be using 6's and 8's for straights and 30 to 24 in radius for the curved. I would like to start adding roadbed, but don't have my turnouts yet. I have found some templates to use but.....
Thanks, Jim
You want to read "Track Planning for Realistic Operation" by John Armstrong. He has superb information on all topics like this. Turnout number refers to the angle of the frog. A #6 turnout the rails diverge by one unit (inches, real feet,scale feet, meters, whatever) at 6 units away from the frog. A #8 turnout diverges one unit at 8 units away from the frog. It's a way of specifying the frog angle in a way that allows a track crew to lay out the turnout using nothing more than a folding rule. Model turnouts OUGHT to be the same. And with a vernier caliper you can check them. A model turnout is a bit more t han just a frog. It has the straight and the diverging tracks going out some distance from the frog. That "some distance" might well vary from maker to maker. Murphy's law says that if you rip out a Maker A turnout and replace it with a Maker B turnout something won't fit and you will have to do some trimming or stretching of the track to allow the Maker B turnout to fit just right.
I used undertable Tortoise switch machines. They need a 1/2 inch hole thru the road bed for the operating rod. I drilled the 1/2 inch BEFORE putting in the turnout. Once the hole was drilled, that fixed the position of the turnout, so I laid all the turnouts first, and then cut and fit the flextrack to marry up with the immovable turnouts.
David Starr www.newsnorthwoods.blogspot.com
KsJimDo all manufacturers keep to the same size for their turnouts?
Model turnouts can vary a lot from maker to maker, even for the same frog number. This adds up fast where multiple turnouts are combined, as in a yard ladder. Here you can see that putting three straight #6 turnouts together results in surprisingly different measurements, depending on the maker.
Unless you have a lot of space, it's important to work to-scale, using the actual dimensions of the turnouts that you will be installing. Otherwise, you may find that what you have planned will not fit.
This is especially true for curved turnouts, which have widely varying lengths and different radii for the same frog number. As an example, the Walthers Code 83 #7 curved turnout is nearly 15” long and the tightest curve is around 22” radius (or less -- they are tighter than labeled), while the PECO Code 83 #7 curved is just over 11” long with the tightest radius of around 30”.
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The best bet is to take your chosen Brand X turnout, flop it on a printer and print up a bunch of track templates. Then lay them out on a sheet of whatever, tack them down with bits of tape and see how close they come to what you want, untrimmed and trimmed. A few minutes of actual testing trumps hours of semi-informed discussion.
Academic to me in any event. I hand-lay all my specialwork to my chosen geometry to suit my trackplan. The fact that it costs less than the manufactured variety is just gravy.
Best of all? The one critical turnout is never on backorder!
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with hand-laid specialwork)
Well, there's what the factory gives -- and what you can do to make things fit when it doesn't. I tend to hack standard turnouts as needed nowadays. One way is to cut the ties at the diverging end so the to diverging tracks can be curved, sometimes together to oneside, i.e. a semi-curved turnout, or apart, i.e. a semi-wye turnout. You do this in HOn3, where the commerical choices are more limited than in standard gauge. Here's one I did as the Cascade Branch eases into Crater Lake.
And on curves, injecting a "straight" turnout isn't too big a deal, provided you do it on a curve with generous radius to begin with. When I built the helper terminal at Tefft recently, the best solution I could come up with was a #4 in the middle of this 24" R curve. The main route follows the curve, but is straight through the turnout, which helps get everything on the main through nicely. The diverging route is more restrictive, but no plans for big power to get through there.
So long as you avoid obvious kinks and efforts to go too sharp with the curvature, you can make things work. I did a quick check of the results on the second pic and I think it came out around 22" -- a reasonable result. And I did go back and work over the kinkish looking spots in the first pic. Everything allowed on the branch trundles right through with nary a complaint.
On the other hand, you would be well advised to take the advice given previously seriously. That way if you every have to fudge things, you'll be in good position to do so by not having already cut down your options prematurely.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Thanks for the input guys!!! Looks like I will be investing in some turnouts before I get to carried away.
Jim
By the way, PECO does have planning templates for their turnouts on their website. I printed them out on cardstock and they proved to be very helpful in seeing what might fit.
Jim,
I believe you will find that Walthers/Shinohara Code 83 has more curved turnouts than anyone else. But the radius of their diverting track is actually consistently 2" less than advertised (for example a 24/20 is really 24/18). At least that has been so in my experience in recent years.
Dante