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What’s your pick-up method??? If you are looking at moving the collection outside you appear to not mind making some adjustments… Okay… so if it is a shoe pickup you will need a rail for it to collect from… BUT… You could improve appearance and save yourself a whole lot of work by going for centre stud contact. This was cutting edge one time. What you need is a metal skate (just like the board of a skate board) suspended by parallel bars between the wheels. This needs to be insulated from everything else with a feed to one side of the motor… just the same as a collector shoe. Between the rails you provide a line of “studs” down the centre. These can be as little as a line of copper nails with a wire feeding them. To be posh you use screws driven through from below with a common feed to them. When I was a kid there was still a row going on whether screws driven from below could give enough electrical contact to provide a reliable feed… people actually insisted that you HAD to use roundhead screws driven downwards… even that you had to solder a wire along the tops. Of course H0/00 would NEVER work / take off… Meanwhile, back in the present… You can work out the details… as I recall my Dad used a stud every third sleeper space except where there was a need for a stud every two. At switches the studs simply follow both centre lines. The skate needs to be long enough to ride on three studs at a time. Most of them were sprung… more to damp-out any bounce than to hold them down. That much metal hanging free between the wheels tends to hold itself down… they were about 9-12mm wide… again, work out what works for you… Oh yeah… they were “double ended” unlike a skateboard… so that they could run both ways. It all works better if you make a gauge to maintain a constant level for the tips of the screws… ie you put the gauge bar on the rails and drive the screw up to meet the cut-out in the underside of the bar… cut-out because the studs must be higher than the rail heads so that the skate doesn’t hit the rails/short out at switches. Hope this is useful. It should be a lot less work than a 3rd rail that you don’t really need. On the subject of falling on/near the juice... we had an 8 car pulled in behind a 4 in the wrong place that left the last two cars hanging out over the switches. A lady got out... HOW does anyone get out without looking???... anyway... when we'd picked her up and sent her to be checked over... there were imprints from the backs of her hands in the crud/oil of not one but two juice rails in the angle of the switches... and she was worried about bruises?!?! Another time a colleague was clipping points (putting a big G cramp under the rails to lock the blade against the stock rail). A piece of paper blew past him. Reflexively he slapped at it and hit the juice (clipping was the one time we used to work right up against live juice). It threw him 20 feet or so... we assume because the DC made his muscles do more of what they were doing. He survived with no outward signs... but rumour had it that his wife reckoned that he glowed in the dark for months afterward. This is one of those stories you have to add "Don't try this at home children". Our uniform and tools were designed short whenever possible to reduce the risk of contact when crossing the juice. If you look at pics of Southern dummy signals you will see that they are usually half moon shaped... horizontal across the lower edge... instead of round on other regions... this is for the same reason... I was told. If you got it wrong the juice rail could give you a "pat"... I'm told that it's like being hit with a bat... but how did they know what that felt like? You could also get "arc eye" if you managed to contact between the 3rd and the running rail. I've seen a shovel... what was left of it... that had done this.
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