I’ve been working on my fiddle yard cassettes over the past couple of days, adding alignment bolts, carrying handles and fold-down padded rail stops.
The base is made from 3/8" plywood, covered in cork sheet, with aluminium angle sides, both to straighten the wood and to act as a safety barrier.
The padded car stop and carrying handle
brass wire locates into square-section brass tube, which has been soldered to copper-clad PCB. The wire bolts also transmit the current to the cassette.
Jon
Those are really neat, in both the “tidy” and “cool” sense of the word. Is the casette a double unit, or is each track independent? What are the dimensions?
The design is based on something Iain Rice put forward in his book on small layouts (Kalmbach), although he uses the edge of the metal angle as the rail (I found it more difficult to rerail cars with this method.
Each cassette is 4’ long and about 3.5" wide
Here’s how the cassette works
The bolts are removed from each end
The car safety stops are lowered into place - they can be dropped in either direction for longer or shorter trains.
The cassette is lifted to where new cars will be added.
The space left for the full cassette
Ps - No freight cars were harmed during the making of this thread
Jon
This is one of the slickest designs for this that I’ve seen. Excellent work Jon!
How many cassettes are you planning to carry to a show? Any plans to create a cassette carrier for multiple cassettes? Looks like a great way to switch out trains “off the layout”, “backstage” so to speak.
More great work Jon, Merlin has a rival.
Will
This idea may solve one of my problems on my small layout! Thanks for posting.
My idea was similar only I’m making two 2-track car barge 300’ long that docks at a car float. I can load the barge and move it off the layout and mov ethe empty into position for loading. This creates an additional interchange. I thought this was a pretty cool idea. Tweet
Very nice work, Jon. I had no idea what these things were, but a picture is worth a thousand swears…er, words.
Thanks guys
Will, I hope to get away with taking 4 cassettes to shows - I’m limited to what I can get into the trunks of 2 Ford Focus estate cars. 4 cassettes will allow for 2 trains ready to come onto the layout and 2 waiting in the wings.
I intend to make the fiddle yard itself into the carrier. It comes in 2 x 4’ pieces which, when folded towards each other and braced with end-boards, will form a box. I’ll then fit the cassettes into the box.
I’ll post pics when I get it made.
Jon