Scratch-building a diamond crossing

I don't know about the web, but Iain Rice's book "An Approach to Building Finescale Track in 4mm", published by Wild Swan, gives a step-by-step photo guide. There is also a simplified version in his book "A Pragmatic Guide to Building, Wiring and Laying PCb Track" (he likes his catchy titles!) published by Railmodel.

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 20:28:54 +0100, "Paul Boyd" wrote in message :
Sounds good to me :-)
Mind you, Ian Rice's version pf pragmatic may not match mine...
Guy

Diamond crossings are difficult to get right. The construction of the crossing V is the same as conventional turnouts and the construction technique can be the same. It is important to get the flangeways as fine as possible because the wheel is un checked through a diamond crossing.

In message , Terry Flynn writes Oh yes it is. Just draw out the triangle made by an axle with one wheel over the rail gap, and the "opposite" rail gap in the middle of the diamond, and you'll see that the other wheel is checked.
Diamond crossings with fixed elbows are only allowed up to 1 in 9, because at shallower angles the triangle as mentioned above moves the second wheel nearer to that opposite gap, in which case it would be unchecked.

In the UK there seems to be a much smaller range of points and crossings. The Americans seem to have a much larger range but do that do it all in code 100.
Kevin

The diamond crossing is unchecked for most HO scale cases. Your prototype example will only apply to scale track standards, P87 and P4. For RTR HO/00 most diamond crossings result in an unchecked flangeway, if you use H0 NMRA, AMRA, NEM, DOGA standards flangeway gaps a 1 in 6 is unchecked. If you use Peco H0/00 finescale your diamond crossing is unchecked. Even the Peco set track diamond crossing which is less than 1 in 3 is unchecked, all because of the coarser than scale flangeways. However by using larger than scale wheel flanges the unchecked gap is bridged by the wheel flange in many cases.