More trackwork - finishing the branch line junction – Part II

Track work:

After getting the turnouts fixed in place, the time came to more permanently fix he track. Since this area of the layout is going to portray a weed-grown locale, I thought to deviate from my normal approach of scenery then ballast, effectively killing two birds with one stone by ballasting this track.

The dark ballast was left over from a long time ago, and I have slowly been using it up wherever I want to have a variety, especially since the “normal” color will be light grey. Hopefully I have enough left to finish the branch line terminal and tracks, or I will have to find a replacement.

I also filled under the floating section from the previous post; it went a lot easier than I expected, and can hopefully get everything to a point where I can start the scenic effects, and ballast around the turnouts.

Wiring:

What good are remotely powered turnouts without the means to work them? As I am powering all of them from a separate transformer, I had to run a bus wire around the layout from the outlets to the control switches, which will be mounted on the fascia.

Power Bus Approach:

I came up with the idea of using household mains cable as a power bus to avoid running dozens of jumpers. It definitely made life easier on the loft layout, so I thought I would give it a try where it presented itself.

Planning the code 40 turnout installations

I actually built these years ago, but have delayed installing them due to issues over control. The basic problem was that I could not find a readily available supply of components that did the job in a cost-effective manner, which I was happy with. Having decided that servo motors fit the bill, I can now get on with it.

 Having built the first turnout (almost) by the book, I deviated from the following ones, and mounted the wood tie strips directly to the roadbed. This will make the placement easier when it comes time to mount them, as well as simplifying the placement of the servo, as there is no guesswork involved in where the turnout sits in relation to the mounting board.

Here you can get a better look at the placement of the future turnouts from the tie strip placement. I’ve also shown the servo mounting board with tie strip attached.

Change to mounting practice

I had been installing the servo on its edge to save space in the footprint, but oddly could not get proper throw in this location using that method. As a possibility I tried turning the servo back on its side, and problem solved. The throw wire is actually thicker than the stock wire provided; I just could not be bothered to change it after I realise it did not solve the problem.

This image shows the revised mounting method.