Tracklaying pt VIII; is it time to say goodbye?

I spent yesterday afternoon putting the final touches to the 2 curved points. I even went so far as to purchase a set of micro drills and a pin vice from Jaycars (for only $32, but I'm not quite sure about the quality of the drills). These were used to drill out the throw bars. it took me 5 goes to get 2 throw bars with the holes in the center of the PGB stock as the drill kept wandering off. I was brave enough to try my homicidal Spanish minidrill, which seemed to work OK (I didn't spill any blood, nor did any wayward bits of drill go whistling past my ears).

After tidying my piss-poor soldering up as best I could, I trialed some wagons through the track work. These worked well enough without check rails, so I then soldered these in. The NMRA track gauge said that there were no problems with the tolerances. However when I tried the wagons through them, the wheels were a bit tight, and of course these were our old friends the Peco under frames. I had thought that the newer spoked wheels were NMRA compliant, though a bit narrow on the back to back. However tests with wheels that were 'right' revealed that these were fine through the points.For once it wasn't my track laying.

Thus I am faced with saying good by to an old friend, who has carried my 4 wheeled wagons many kilometers, both scale and real. Their enormous flanges have smoothed out the many flaws in my track work. Unfortunately, as time and skills move on, what once was extremely useful is now a liability. It seems that I will have to replace all my Peco wheel sets with Parkside Dundas or Farish.

However its starting to look quite sexy. I've debated whether or not to move the right hand side track a bit more towards the camera so that the tracks running across the road crossing are parallel. Unfortunately this would shorten an already short passing loop, making it a bit less useful. I don't think its going to make a huge difference so I might just leave it where it is.