M
ost derailments on a model railroad happen at turnouts, so it’s worthwhile to make sure your layout has the best-performing turnouts possible – especially if you’re interested in reducing derailments and getting optimum performance from your equipment. One of the best ways to get top-performing turnouts is to hand-build them. Fortunately in recent years, commercial jig-built turnout fixtures like Fast Tracks and Proto87 Stores have become popular, making it a lot easier to produce top-notch turnouts (after a little practice) with relative ease. For more details how jig-built turnouts help ensure the best layout performance, see the sidebar: Why jig-built turnouts? Sure, it’s possible to handlay turnouts without a jig, but I find I do my best work at the workbench when I have a jig to goof-proof my work. I’ve hand built turnouts in place on the layout and the experience more often than not has left me feeling like I’ve been impersonating a contortionist. When I’m uncomfortable, I tend to rush, and then I live to regret it later when the turnout gets problems.
The poor man’s jig idea The Fast Tracks jigs are great (and I use their filing jigs in the Poor Man’s process), but the cost of entry is not low, especially if all you need are a few turnouts.
Also, I like good tie plate and spike head detail. The Fast Tracks fixture method doesn’t provide tie plate and spike head detail to suit my taste. On the other hand, Proto87 Stores has an excellent jig system that provides great tie plate and spikehead detail, but it involves hand-placing individually etched tie plates and driving nearscale spikes. This is a bit too tedious for me when I have 120+ turnouts on my HO Siskiyou Line. Proto87 Stores sells the Central Valley plastic tie strips for HO standard gauge. These tie strips have properly gauged slots for the rail, making building a turnout drop-in simple, similar to the Fast Tracks jigs. Plus there’s nice tie plate and spike head detail too.
Figure 2
The Central Valley tie strips sell for about $6 each and can be adapted to use printed-circuit board ties for attaching the rail, which is the focus of this article. In effect, I get a plastic turnout-laying jig for $6, making the price of entry much more attractive than Fast Tracks for a few turnouts1 1 If you’re building more than a few turnouts, the Fast Tracks jigs become a more attractive option because the cost per turnout drops dramatically.
Figure 2 and 3: Here’s a close view of the Central Valley turnout tie strips. As you can see, the tie strips have self-gauging slots for the rail, and they have excellent tie plate and spike head detail. Since I use Micro Engineering flex track with its detailed tie plates and spike heads, turnouts built using the Central Valley tie strips fit right in.
Page 49 • Issue 11-09• Sep 2011 • Poor Man’s Jig-built Turnouts, page 2
Figure 3
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