Awoken with sleeping

Now that the first set of turnout components are here, I have started preparation by glueing down all the sleepers I can. The turnout sleepers themselves are a bit special.

Pointing the way

I’ve now received one set of turnout wonderment from Stephen at www.borg-rail.co.uk

This is a common crossing and a set of blades for a left hand turnout and will allow me to construct the first point on the layout and consider whether I can do the others myself.

Test track completed

Some progress - dad bought me some 14.2mm track from the 3mm society.

After assembly this has created a useful test track for running my Locos. The 0.2mm is not a problem.

Couplings

Here is the first coupling successfully applied to the first wagon I built – a platform wagon on rugga chassis. A few things I’ve learned:

- The springs are very easy not only to lose but to damage, you need to be very careful.

- The lubricant ‘grease-em’ is proper weird stuff, like silver sparkling dust.  seems to work though

- You don’t need to overtighten the screws when mounting them as otherwise the coupling fails to work correctly

- My they are fiddly to put together, but once you get a system together, it’s fine.

Pick me up

Tonight I added pickups to the Lbt chassis I built earlier this year and to the new milled lay chassis. I found some shorting problems with the latter (pickups touching the chassis) so I altered them to touch the top of the wheel not the back.

Tested them and all good. Must get a longer test track though. Sn3 track here we come.

Also ordered the woodland scenics 4% incline starter and a large pack of 1015 microtrains couplers from mg sharp today.

2ft versus 2ft 6

At Shepton dad bought a cracking scratchbuilt model of Prince. It has a faulhaber coreless motor and has been nicely put together. The name chronus is a bit odd but that will soon be gone! However it runs on 16.5mm gauge.

Dad us also making good progress with a model of Countess also to 16.5mm gauge.

Now of course the real Prince runs on 2ft gauge track and Countess on 2ft 6. Put them next to each other as in the photo and the difference is striking. You couldn't run these together on a layout.

So should Prince be converted to 14mm or run in a separate 16.5mm layout?

the problem with the 14mm option is that the track would have to be built and its not as easy as my o14 jubilee track!

16.5mm is so appealing for mainline narrow gauge as the rtr peco track is so readily available but it really does look wrong for locos like Prince! Why can't peco build 14mm track and points?

A third loco

So, I saw an opportunity on ebay and went for it.  I purchased another ruston LBT, this time with the milled (almost RTR) chassis.  After discussions on NGRM, KBscale have been very generous to send me (FOC) the LAT style buffer beams which are not as deep as in the LBT.  This means that I can put it together as a ruston LAT.  cool.