Trackwork pt III

Well, some serious progress was made yesterday. First up a trip to do my community outreach to senior citizens ( cutting up cork and feeding them beer). I took the plank with me and did a bit of work under the watchful eyes of my tracklaying mentors (who also happen to be the aforementioned seniors) while they drank beer and provided useful comments (like "Geez, I'd hate to have us watch you doing this"). Last night after the lady of the house had headed off for the evening I got stuck in and did a fair bit of work. I finally sorted out the various running rails, and managed to get the frogs in the right position. Then it was into making point blades. This revealed that I had not filed the running rail cutouts to the same depth on the top and the bottom. This meant that I then had to reshape the point blade so that it was thinner on the bottom than on the top, so that the top would meet with the top of the running rail when closed.
(why do I feel like I've just written a passage in Greek? I promise to do this properly with pictures when I get everything sorted a bit better)

Finally after all this was done, and everything installed, in went the check rails. these required a bit of tweaking to get right as there was a fair bit of lateral shifting at the wagons rolled through.


Amazingly after all the buggering around, it works. Now I just have to gap the PCB sleepers and then install the tiebars and that's it. My first piece of hand laid track, an exact fit for the location, all for the princely sum of about $15.
Hmm, now which bit is next....

(Oh, and as a note of interest, the newer Peco wagon wheels (the spoked ones) are NMRA compliant, where as the older solid ones are not. The Parkside Dundas ones are rather 'variable' but can be adjusted, though the metal rims do have a habit of popping off the plastic inners. They are just a press fit so its easy to fix)