Advice on track crossing baseboard joints

This idea of simply butt-jointing the rail at the board ends seems to work well on Paul Wade's exhibition layout 'Tonbridge West Yard' , which doesn't even have the rail soldered to PCB sleepers at the joints. After over a decade of helping set up and put away this layout at exhibitions, I struggle to think of one derailment caused by misaligned joints. Two points to note, however- firstly, make sure your boards are level in relation to one another, and secondly protect the rail ends when the layout is not in use or is being transported. This can be done by using some pieces of ply deeper than the board and track, which pick up on the locating dowels- if it is possible to bolt these into position, then do so. In the case of TWY, pairs of boards are separated for transport by this method, being held with the tracks 'facing ' one another. Brian

Rob,

The method with strips of PCB at the edges does work well and is worth proceeding with. Your main problem might be how accurate the dowels will hold the boards together when the layout is repeatedly assembled and disassembled.

An alternative method is to use brass countersunk screws at the baseboard edges - one screw under each rail end with the rails soldered to them. It does the same job as your PCB strip but is possible easier to hide.

If you're looking for suitable PCB strip, 7mm point sleepering is quite suitable and comes in approximately 1/4"/7mm widths.

Jim.

"Jim Guthrie" wrote

Guess what I've got sitting alongside the edges of the lifting section of my railway? :-)

John.

Robert Flint wrote: [...]

Should work - I, like other responders, have seen this done on exhibition layouts, and it seems to work well. I've noticed that some people also chamfer the inside and top edges of the railhead slightly, and/or use guard rails on either side of the joint. The guard rails presumably prevent the wheels from picking the gap.

Since you have 3/4 MDF laid directly on te floor, I'd be more worried about vertical alignment, since the boards will follow whatever irregularities there are in the floor, despite those metal dowels.

HTH&GL

Looking at some exhibition layouts, quite a few appeared to have some vertical misalignment without any apparent affect on trains (when they bothered to run any). I didn't notice any horizontal misalignments.

Mark Thornton