Oh no! HOn3? SPNG??

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
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As some of you are aware, I have been planning a new railroad in a 15X16 room based on the Tonopah & Tidewater/ Bullfrog Goldfield RR/ Las Vegas & Tonopah RR. Many a Cadrail design has been made in the past few months and starting the layout with Bachmann 4-6-0’s and Roundhouse was about to happen.

BUT!!! As part of the cleaning out my basement for my move to a new job, I found a whole bunch of SP narrow gauge cars that I built back in the early 1980’s and stored away. These were made back when I had really good eyes and could really build a model. I thought they had been lost or sold back when I lived in San Diego 20 years ago. Now I am thinking about modeling the SPNG. HOn3 is pretty small and fitting sound decoders into those engines would be a real challenge. On the other hand, one could model full yards and scenes of the SPNG in the space I have available. I could even model the Mina area and have both SPNG, SP standard gauge and Tonopah and Goldfield RR all in the same space. I may have to start the design process completely over!

Anyone know when one can get dual gauge turnouts? - Nevin

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See

http://www.railwayeng.com/turnouts.htm

Have fun

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Shinohara manufactures dual gauge turnouts in code 70, but they are often hard to find or stuck on backorder with a delivery date of ???. The choices of turnout # are also limited.

The alternative is to build your own specialwork, which is only limited by the availability of rail, spikes and ties. This also makes it possible to build all of the many variants of dual-gauge specialwork (like three- to four-rail transitions to keep the weight of a narrow gauge loco centered over the center bearing of a turntable.)

Thanks to Lasik and good close-up gasses, my eyesight is actually better now than it was in the 80’s - and arthritic fingers can still file, spike and solder hand-laid specialwork to NMRA spec.

Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)