Garden Railway Forum

Not sure where to post this, so. There must be some people on here who do 16mm indoors with battery electrics. Narrow gauge to me is all about little beasties on spidery track,peat bog style. An engine like a Ruston or Lister looks daft on SM 32 track or similar. Would it work if I used Code 100 F/B rail on copper clad sleepers? I've built track in 009 using Code 40, 7mm scale on Code 60 and Gn 15 using Code 82. Any thoughts about this approach? I will have to be careful with flanges and clearances. But I think it will look "right". Big steamers just won,t fit. Point work as well will be down to a 6" radius. A challenge I think.

Martin at Atropos is making Quarry trackwork and points. He is using '0' gauge flat bottom rail. I believe he is now selling it.

Thank you. Do you have a contact for him?

I would very much like to know more about the Atropos track re prices etc. A major pity theres no website.
Barry

Apparently O gauge F/B rail is Code 143,which is way to heavy in appearance I think. Peat bog style track is very light, about 3" high if I remember. That's what made me think of Code 100.

This table is from an old Hudson Catalogue. Generally 2ft gauge light temporary railways and those for peat workings and sandpits etc using small loco haulage would use 20 lb/yd and the heavier locomotive 'main line' type railways, like those carrying passengers, would use 35 lb/yd or more.

JOhn

I will PM martins number tomorrow.

I could be wrong about the rail. I know it looked very light and an IP simplex could just make the corner and only just missed the chairs.

That's the trick. The loco should almost as if it's on the ground,not 12" up in the air.

The fun and games start here. Can anyone tell me what clearance I should have 'twixt stock rail and check rails for point work please? I was thinking of around 4 mm,would this be enough? I've also got to get a set of roller gauges made,as there is nothing out the for the rail section I'm going to use. Rod for my back comes to mind.

My hand made track has 3mm flange ways.

Interesting. What rail do you use,and what size loco's do you run. I'm going down the Decauville style route and will be using 4 wheel battery loco's. The ruling radius on point work will be in the order of 12" on Code 100 rail. Tight but do-able.

My track is made from bar stock and I run live steam.The standard back to back for 16mm/32mm gauge is 28mm.

Catweasel:65548 wrote:The fun and games start here. Can anyone tell me what clearance I should have 'twixt stock rail and check rails for point work please? I was thinking of around 4 mm,would this be enough?

What wheel standards are you going to use?

SM32 usually uses O gauge standards, so O gauge coarse standards would probably be what you'd want for industrial prototypes in SM32. They are available online here.....

http://www.gauge0guild.com/manual/01_1_Standards.pdf

If you make your own wheels, I guess you could use any track standards you like, but that stops you running on anyone else's track.

For very sharp curves, you are better off widening the gauge if you start to see flange binding, which is probably unlikely with short wheelbase things like skips.

Real turnouts usually have straight rail through the crossing (frog) so if your wheels are standard and you build turnouts as per prototype, your flangeways can also follow the standards.

4mm sounds very wide for flangeways in 16mm scale, even on portable industrial track. Gauge 1 coarse scale flangeways are 3mm max. and O gauge coarse scale flangeways are 2.2mm max.

I don't know if anything like it was ever used for real portable track, but you could always build points with closing frogs like the old Hornby tinplate track. Flangeways aren't an issue if you don't have check rails...........

Regards,
Graeme