Full Steam Ahead and a Picnic

Nothing much to add this week other than we are still pushing on.

Wire drops are put through the board in the fiddle yard and soldered to the rails. In time these will be cut and joined again via a connector under the baseboard. This will allow for easy separation of the baseboards for travel to and from exhibitions.

Front of house the track is joined up and insulating fish plates put on all of the frogs. It is our intention is to run this section as a whole, so jumpers will be used to bypass the insulation. The thinking behind this is that if we change our minds next week (that’s never happened before) we can easily create sections.

As on the fiddle yard side we use the brass screw and solder trick to stabilise the rails as they cross the baseboard join. We’ll cut sometime later.

Then before gluing the track down we make some simple track gauges using scrap wood this helps hold the spacing. A few squirts of PVA under the track, avoiding any moving bits and the addition of some heavy weights and were done for now.