Since I plan to purchace a number of large (13-15’‘) steam locomotives, my old Walthers 90’ and Hejan turntable are too small. I need to find a turntable that will fit the PCM Reading T1, and other BLI and PCM engines.
The Walthers 130’ turntable would work very nice for what I need. It has a good design, and it is plenty large. The problem is that it is $300, and assembled.
Bowser turntables would also fit the need, but the price of the kits, are too, still expensive for what I want.
CMR turntables fit the need and the bill, but I want to still look for another option.
Are there any other turntables out there that will fit a 15’’ long steam engine? Or, are these the only options?
The Walther 130 foot turntable is on sale right now for $240 if that makes the pain any easier to take. [:)] If you have the time, skill, and patience, you could always scratch build a turntable but the Walthers turntable is an awfully nice model and really a good deal fully assembled, motorized and 60 indexing positions. I suspect that you might wish you spent the extra money on the Walthers turntable when you’re into your 40th hour of trying to assemble the CMR kit.
Walthers has it on sale this month for approx 239. For the 130’ tt. I say bite the bullet and get one. I know I will be, but not during this sale. I have heard people say that the assembled ones are far better than the kits which supposedly have warped pits.
You already states your interest in buying big steam engines. So, dont bother with the little 90’ tt. There used to be several custom TT builders but the money they wanted are way beyond Walther’s pricing.
The rest of the TT’s such as Atlas, Kibri etc… not worth a moment’s consideration for the large steam.
after doing a lot of research on the web i’ve come to the conclusion that you can spend a lot of money on a turntable , or you can spend a lot of time building one , or you can do both [:)]
the biggest problem is indexing . unless of course you’re happy to align the tracks by eye , but i think most of us want the turntable to stop automatically with the tracks lined up so we can just drive the train on and off the turntable .
Here’s an idea I saw somewhere and am considering for my layout. Buy an Atlas turntable and motor. Yes, I know it’s not long enough for what you need. The Allas TT gets mounted under your TT pit with a plastic film can epoxied to the center, open end sticking up through a hole in the pit. You build the TT and pit you want, with the film can cap epoxied to the underside of the TT bridge. The Atlas TT provides the motion and indexing inexpensively, you can build any length TT you want. The TT bridge snaps on or off as needed for minor adjustments, and covers the hole to the Atlas TT. Just my 2 cents. Ken
that’s a really good idea , i haven’t heard of the film can technique before . i’m planning on using some variation of that myself so i’m not knocking your suggestion when i say there are 3 things one needs to be aware of when using the Atlas turntable as a hidden base for a turntable
the atlas turntable stops at each detent as it goes around the circe whether you have a track there or not . most normally indexed turntables only stop at the detent you want them to stop at
there is a detent every 15 degrees (21 total detents) , this lines up perfectly with the stalls in the Atlas roundhouse , but not with any other roundhouse
assuming you want your turntable motorized , the motor sticks up quite a bit above the level of the turntable meaning you either have to bury the turntable deep enough below the pit so it doesn’t stick up above ground , or you have to build some sort of structure to cover it
as long as you can deal with or igonore these ‘problems’ the atlas will work great . the turntable and motor unit are on sale at walthers.com right now for $19.98 each , making it the least expensive method other than scratchbuilding
Sounds like Atlas either restricts thier Engine Products to those that fit the old turntable or are very reluctant to allow bigger turntables to be made that might cut into thier roundhouse kit sales.
I think changes are needed at Atlas. They need to step up and build us a big turntable to buy with 10 degree spacing and buried motors. Otherwise they will continue to be the Yellowfish Tuna in Sharkland.
There’s a limit to what you can do with this. As I found, the alignment of the bridge with the original deck track is critical if the indexing is to be of any value, and if you use a longer bridge, then you will have to be even more careful, as the magnitude of any alignment error will go up in proportion to the radius of the circle.
You can’t support the bridge on the film can (or in my case, the old 45 rpm record spindle) without some additional help at the ends. I had to install a real pit-rail and bogies. Again, this presents an “engineering challenge” to lay a perfectly circular pit rail and then scratch-build bogies that will work.
Then, there’s the motor mechanism. This is a shot of the turntable installed with its motor. Note that the motor unit is attached to the original deck. In the pit installation, it is below the surface level of the layout, so you don’t have a problem if you want to scenic it out of existence. On mine, I used the original shed, cut down, painted and weathered, sitting on a foam platform, so that I could remove it for maintenance if necessary. By the way, hiding the motor like this really quiets it down.
Note the position of the motor drive, though. If you plan to make the bridge much larger than the original deck, you’re going to run into a problem. The motor is going to be where you want to put a pit rail. I haven’t tried this, and at this point I’m not going to pull things apart to do it, but I suspect that you could monkey around with the junction of the motor unit and the original mechanical hand-wheel drive, so that the motor drive would mount upside-down and still engage the bull gear. (Th
