Building turnouts

St Petrock station throat

I've been building my own turnouts for decades - more time consuming than buying them, but much cheaper and (most importantly) they can be designed to fit my track plan, rather than the track plan being adjusted to fit (say) PECO's designs.

Over the years I've experimented with various methods.  Soldering rails to EMGS rivets, set in plywood sleepers, resulted in some very nice pointwork, and certainly nothing looks more like wooden sleepers that strips of real wood. More recently, I tried C&L plastic chairs and sleepers. These produced far-and-away the best looking turnouts, but I found that I needed to strengthen the crossing (frog) with a copper-clad sleeper, and the whole assembly was the very devil to adjust after gluing if I didn't get everything spot-on first time.

So for St Petrock I've reverted to the first method I ever tried - soldering the rails to copper-clad sleepers.  I usually start by lightly gluing a photocopied template (B6 and B7 are my favourites), overlaying with strips of double-sided sticky tape and then cutting the sleepers to size and sticking them to the tape.  After that, it's a relatively simple job to cut, file and solder the rails in place, guided by a couple of roller gauges.

The nail is not a permanent feature!

To my mind, the key to successful turnout construction is getting the rails at the crossing point perfectly in line, which I do with two sleeper strips (see photo).  After that, it matters little if the rest of the turnout is nearer a B7½ than a B7, or the curved stock rail doesn't quite follow the official contour.  It'll work.  If the spirit moves, I can always add cosmetic chairs later, but I was heartened to discover that even Geoff Kent got his chair-less copper-clad turnouts on Blakeney past the eagle-eyed editor of the Model Railay Journal (No.65, 1993, page 209).  Mind you, when you can construct buildings to his standard, who's going to worry about a few absent chairs... or even (it would seem) a Britannia running into a north-Norwich country terminus?  Really!

Thanks to my little brother - who now earns his living designing turnouts in 12 inches to the foot scale - I have a large quantity of phosphor bronze rail and decided to use it for the check rails, to hint at the rusty colour of the real ones.  I realize that the wing rails should be a similar colour, but you're not supposed to notice that.  Hopefully, once the sleepers have been painted, you won't notice either where I've ground away the copper.  To avoid a gigantic short circuit, such things are necessary - one of the disadvantages of copper-clad construction.

That just leaves some method of operating the turnout, which can be the subject of a future post.