The LIRR Industrial Service, Inc. shelf layout

[Lemosteam]

Looks great as always, nice progress.  You might want to tune that turnout that is causing the derailment in the last photo 

@Scottl Thank you so much!  I assure you that PRR turnout functions flawlessly  !  This ain't Penn Central or Conrail!  That was the giant hand of a god that did that!

[OldEastRR]

How about one of those sharp radius Peco turnots? they have excellent function.

[robert3985]

Robert,  that's fair, but then it fits in with the premise of the IS, i.e. old, useable junk!.  I have no desire at all to hand lay any switches.  These are really old; I picked them up at a show 20 yeas ago and they were old then!  The one I chose cleaned up pretty nicely and was in gauge. I only have a very short amount of straight to fit this in and after trimming it, it is short enough. Not sure how I am going to throw the turnout yet though.  Thinking of using an over-center spring.  I have already isolated the frog, but still thinking of how to power it or if I even need to.

@Lemosteam - I was relating the evolution of my own turnout-making experiences, and the poor quality of these turnouts.  Yup, of course they can be "fixed" and since there aren't any ties, other than a few (a verrry few) PCB ties, modding the turnout to fit your space is probably a pretty quick and easy solution since it's a #4.

I've done sorta the same thing for some friends except I used ME #6's to make "wyes" for their layouts...which wasn't all that difficult for me because at the time, I already had a couple of hundred hand-made turnouts under my belt.

Since the engines you'll be running on it will have short wheelbases, it would probably be a "good idea" to power the frog , and there are a myriad of ways to do it, the simplest way (probably...since I don't have any experience with them) would be to use a Frog Juicer, with the points being held in place by your aforementioned over-center spring...which isn't difficult to make. 

I hope you DCC-friendly-ized the turnout, making the closure rails and point rails the same polarity as the adjacent stock rails...which is just a matter of how you gapped the PCB ties and the throwbar.  DCC-friendly turnouts are also DC friendly.

As always, I really enjoy watching the progress you're making on your layout.

Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore

[Lemosteam]

Robert, thanks!

As of today, I’ve had to rebuild the whole darn turnout, but used the original ties to keep it in gage while I did that.

Can you share a thread to “friendly-ize” the turnout for DCC? I’m not quite clear on the terminology you shared. The last thing I need is electrical issues.

[robert3985]

Robert, thanks!

As of today, I’ve had to rebuild the whole darn turnout, but used the original ties to keep it in gage while I did that.

Can you share a thread to “friendly-ize” the turnout for DCC? I’m not quite clear on the terminology you shared. The last thing I need is electrical issues.

@Lemosteam - I did a Google search for how to electrically gap an N-scale hand-laid PCB turnout to be DCC/DC Friendly, but was unsuccessful, so I created my own photo diagram with callouts and text that pretty well explains where to put the gaps in the PCB ties and where to not put them.

Photo (1) - My DCC Friendly Turnout Diagram:


Note that I Photoshopped a photo of one of my own hand-laid turnouts and made the rail gaps at the frog much larger (to be more obvious) and regularized the gaps in the copper cladding of the PCB ties to be near the center of each tie for clarity's sake.

In actuality, my gaps in the copper cladding on my turnouts' PCB ties are very irregular and randomly positioned to be much less noticeable when the turnout is painted, but still positioned correctly to achieve DCC/DC Friendliness.

Hope this assists you in getting your turnout circuitry done correctly.

Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore