Flex track has been around for a while. I remember HO sections with brass rails and fiber ties. Track was stiff as a board. Not hard to bend, but once you did, it was not going to spring back on its own.
Before that people probably hand-laid their track if they wanted to get so radical as not following the radius manufactured. That is slightly before my time (but probably not much!).
Not exactly. There is a bit of geometry involved depending the equipment length. A easment isn’t really needed for curves over 30" radius.
However any curve will look better by adding easments. Is your reverse curve more than 180 degrees? If so, easments will not add much, if any, width of the layout.
Adelie figured an offset of 3/4" for a 40"radius. So then, an 80" diameter curve, plus easments and some space from the edge for saftey, I’d say 7 1/2 feet of space would be a safe minimum.
Not what you like to hear, is it? But then you don’t really need easments with such a wide curve. That you would be at your 7 foot limit. However, you should add a guard rail at the edge.
Here’s another explanation for Easments
In the Atlas track plan books, they show how to add easments to an 18" radius curve. A 1/2-18"r section is placed in the middle of the reverse curve. At the ends of the curve, a 22"r section is placed at each end instead of a 18"r section. It adds 1/4" to the radius (1/2" to diameter) center line.
I don’t know of any sectional tracks larger than 22"r.
Welcome to the “I’m not a rocket scientist” club, which I’m a member of. You can print out easment templates or use the stick method (read further down). You can buy a Yardstick Compass to draw curve center lines. I made my own out of 3/4" X 3/4" stick with a hole on one end, tight enough to hold a nail and more holes, to hold pencils, for the track center line and the road bed edges.
You can draw directly onto a sheet of plywood if you are using the cookie cutter method. But that won’t work for spline roadbed or if you use Rick Rideouts method of sub-road bed (I can explaine that later if you like).
I made templates out of 24" X 28" poster boards. I taped the poster board a work table and drew out the center line and the road bed edges. For marling track centers, I cut out along the center line and inner road bed line. For templates that are as wide the road bed, I cut at the road bed lines. I used the first template to draw out the others.
As Adelie said, the offset is 3/4" for an easment on a 40"r curve. Draw the full curve center line with the co
Beware of the mold! [;)]
Ask the wife hold the easment stick while you draw out the center line. If she is paying attention, and I’m sure she will, she’ll figure what you’re up to and It won’t be so much of a shock and it’ll bring up the issue before you lay track. Just something else to think about.
[yeah]
[%-)]
Finished addding another two feet to the width for a total of 7’ and added an additional 3’ to the length for a total of 7’ by 12’…this thing is swallowing up my tiny garage. I do agree that some of the calculations are pretty serious, reminds me of my horror days in college math class. Wi***heir was a program out there that you enter your flex track the way you want to design it and it spits out what the minimum width and length of your bench work in order to gear how big your layout is going to be…if the software is out there, I couldn’t figure it out. I had a heck of a time trying to figure out RTS and El Dorado! BTW, I just about had to pick up the wife’s eyes off the ground once she saw walked in the garage and just about tripped over the expansion area. [:0] Steve