here’s the roundhouse i want http://www.hobbylinc.com/htm/atl/atl709.htm
and here’s the turntable http://www.hobbylinc.com/htm/atl/atl305.htm
does the roundhouse come with it’s own track? will the turntable power the section of track it’s set to or do i need terminal rail joiners on each track? how long of an engine will the roundhouse hold? the turntable (9") would just barley hold my AC4400 and it’d hang off the edges a little (but all the wheels would be on the turntable)—thanks in advance
Maybe you should ask this question over on the ATLAS RR forum. I’m sure that there are tons of people there that could answer your question.
Click on Forum on the top tab, then select the HO scale forum.
The Atlas TT is powered. The Atlas Roundhouse has room for tracks that are about 10+ inches in length(in the building) - there is about a 3" ‘lead’ from the edge of the TT to the front wall of the roundhouse. There is no track included with the roundhouse. You will need to power each of the roundhouse tracks from the TT power, and use some kind of on/off switch if you need to kill the power to the stall tracks in the roundhouse.
Jim
the round house should have no problem holding your AC4400, i cant even fit my pacific on the turn table but it fits in the round house
Go to the Altas website and do a search on ROUNDHOUSE. They state the inside stall length is 8". This does not sound right as the table is 9" long. The track spacing is 15 degrees which puts the roundhouse very close to the turntable. This saves space but does not look right.
so i could use terminal rail joiners on each of the tracks in the roundhouse and connect them to the Atlas connecter to turn them on and off- if there is electrical power to the turntable track- would the roundhouse track be powered by the T-table track or do i need to insulate the track (from the t-table) so it can be dead if needed
nedthomas,
Look at the photos of the turntable and roundhouse on the Atlas site. As I mentioned in the above post, there is about a 3"-5" lead before the track hits the front wall of the roundhouse. On my roundhouse, I modified the ‘base’ and have extended the track in the roundhouse closer to the back wall. I am using a modified Walthers 90’ TT(old one), driven by a Atlas TT underneath it. This way I get a 12" TT and I have about 10" for each of the 3 stalls in the Roundhouse. Most of my engines are in the Spectrum 2-8-0 range or GP9 diesels that ‘live’ there. My BLI Heavy 2-8-2 will fit on the TT, but the tender sticks out of the stalls. This is OK as I leave them on the road freights and they are usually in ‘staging’ anyway. The Roundhouse is just for the ‘local’ engines that work out of the town/yard.
Jim
I’m tight for space, and my 60’s era layout uses relatively small engines, so I’ve got both the turntable and the roundhouse you’re talking about. The stalls are about 9 1/4 inches from the door to the back of the track well, and about 4 inches out from the front of the door to the turntable. You could hack out some plastic and get close to another inch inside before you hit the wall. Since the doors are manually operated, people leave them open. You could hang locomotives a couple of inches out the door without having them interfere with each other.
When Jim says above that the turntable is powered, he means that the track is powered. The turntable as shown in the link is manual, and has a big really silly-looking wheel. You can buy a motor kit for about the same price as the turntable, roughly $20. It’s well worth the cost. This turntable is indexed, which means that it will stop at each slot and wait a few seconds before continuing around.
The tracks inside the roundhouse have no wiring at all, and the turntable has no provision for powering external tracks. But, it’s easy enough to hook wires to each track, and your idea of using a toggle switch for each stall is a good one. You do have to be careful of the track polarity with this turntable. Each slot in the turntable is marked either A or B. All the A slots have one polarity, and all the B slots are the other. This is just the way it has to be to accomodate tracks all the way around - you need a flipover somewhere.
This is a shot of the inside of my roundhouse:
It doesn’t come with any interior detailing at all, but I really had a lot of fun doing this.
Gee, Mr. B, you done good! I like the lighting and detailing effects in your shot. Congratulations!!
I used the 90’er from WS and the Cornerstone three-staller. However, I spaced them about 2" further than they were meant to be. This required an extension to both the bridge rails and to the stall rails. It doesn’t look prototypical, but it allows me to turn a P2K FA2/B2 set, my Hudson, and all others except my Niagara and Challenger. Also, as a result of the extensions, they can all nose into their stalls nicely. If you nestle them up as they are supposed to, you will only get smaller steamers and a single diesel on there.
The lighting only looks good because the roof is still not installed. I do plan to light the interior, but that’s probably for the holiday break at the earliest.
The interior walls are printed on the computer. I downloaded a sample of “cinderblock” paper, shoved a few of them together digitally and printed them. The wood plank floor is made of coffee stirrers.
The pictures above the workbench, other than the motorcycle, are very, very small renditions of actual Playboy centerfolds from 1967. Strictly prototype. Count her rivets if you’d like.
great roundhouse MR.B, yes i was thinking of getting the motor for the t-table what does it have for a switch to make it spin?–thanks for all your help everybody-- if i have room i’ll get 2 houses for a 6 stall roundhouse
If your locomotives don’t fit inside just do what UP did. Build extensions! What is left of the roundhouse in Cheyenne was not big enough to fit the 3985 in the stalls so… UP built a 3 or 4 foot extension to one of the stalls so she could be put away in the roundhouse when the backshop did not have room for her. Before they built the extension they had to put the tender in one stall in the locomotive in another stall.
I will say that seeing a AC4400 will be an odd sight. Are all your engines facing the same way and you have no wye?
Bruce,
Your photo show what a great structure this roundhouse is. One of the problems with a 3 stall roundhouse that has 10 degree stalls is that you wind up with a narrow looking structure. The 15 degree spacing ‘fills out’ the structure and it looks bigger than it is. The kit really is well though out and goes together very well. Once I get my modified TT re-installed again, I will have to take some pictures. The Atlas TT that ‘drives’ my Walthers 90’ TT is very smooth running(much better than an old Atlas TT/motor or the Hobbytown ‘coffee grinder’ I used to have!
Jim
I’ve got an older model of the motor drive unit, but since it fits I’ll assume they are really the same. The drive is basically a fixed locomotive motor. It takes DC, which you run through a reverser switch with an off position. I just use a plain double-pole, double-throw toggle switch with a center off. This is the same thing you get in the Atlas “Controller” or “Twin.” Presumeably, you could wire this to a DCC decoder and be able to run it from your throttle.
Atlas did design the roundhouse to allow additional stalls. They even provide the extra interior bracing you would need when putting kits together. For the low price of this kit, I think there’s pretty good detail, and I’d recommend it. There is a lot of satisfaction to taking something like this kit and putting in the effort to make it into a high-quality model. When I saw what my LHS guy had done to his, I knew it could be done.
The link I had has unfortunately gone bad, but some people have taken the guts of this turntable and bashed it into a pit turntable. All that was necessary was to build a structure below the layout and mount the turntable there, and then add a bridge on top and a circular rail on the outside to support the bridge. The rest is just scenery, and the results were pretty nice. The turntable mechanism itself is solid and reliable, and it indexes to each rail position perfectly. I have an old one of these, which I pulled out of the attic after 40 years. I oiled the motor, hooked up the wires and it ran like a charm. (I only replaced it because the old ones had track positions every 30 degrees, and I needed 15-degree slots for the roundhouse.)
are rounhouses still used by railroads today?