I feel sheepish. I did one more search and found what I was looking for... only it's not made anymore. Walthers 948-827. A 6.5 right turnout. I see they now have 948-83064, which is supposedly 24" and 28" radii. That might be the best that can be done, unless I can find an old 6.5 at a swap meet. Sorry to have kept you all up.
-Matt
Returning to model railroading after 40 years and taking unconscionable liberties with the SP&S, Northern Pacific and Great Northern roads in the '40s and '50s.
Here's the track plan that was most recent when I started building the layout (for full size, click to open, then close the image, then click it open again -- I don't know why).
Grid is 3" per small square, 1 foot per large square. The layout so far looks pretty similar to this plan, but as you can imagine, some of the track isn't exactly where the plan says it should be. Turnouts take up more room than you thought they would, or they have wider radius than you had planned for, grades need more horizontal runway, etc. The pertinent fact tonight is that the bridges up at 10 o'clock are both installed further south than the plan here. Also, the bridge on the branch (crossing the mainline), is going to have to be two spans instead of one, which puts it even further south. This makes the already tight curves into the town at the end of the branch even tighter. I will have to give up one of the spurs right from the beginning, because I need a straight that is about 46 inches long so because I may have a local train as long as five freight cars and a combine pulled by a steam loco with tender. The runaround is a dealbreaker, because there's no reverse loop.
Hopefully this helps you see my problem. It looked like a good idea on paper, but when I drew this I still hadn't had any experience with turnouts, and thought you could just put one wherever you want. Really, they only go where they like to go.
(See what I did there? Curves and "straits"?... okay never mind. It's late for puns anyway.)
Hi Guys. I will need several consecutive curved turnouts -- tight ones -- in order to bend my branch into town and still be able to fit a runaround track in and also break off to a few industries. (All this fallout is still falling out from the fact that I had to move one turnout on my mainline, which in turn moved a bridge, which moved a river, which extended the branch tangent over the river, which tightened the curve that my branch has to negotiate to get into town.
(Incompetent track planning. Please don't lecture me. I was inexperienced.))
I already have some curved turnouts going into my yard -- Atlas 596s, I think, outer is something like 30" radius. But I was sure there were now smaller radius curved turnouts and I don't see any now...
... except for Tillig #85333 which I found in Germany. They look slightly sharper than the Atlas turnouts, though Tillig expresses the curve in degrees from straight instead of radii, so it's hard to tell. They are Code 83, which is what I need. But are European track brands compatible with US track brands? Does anyone have any experience with Euro turnouts? Also, is there an American product (Walthers, Atlas) that I'm just not seeing that has a sharper curve than the Atlas 596?
Thanks in advance.