I’m toying with the idea of scratchbuilding my own turntable using 0-27 track and two powered trucks to move the bridge assembly.
Has anyone done this?
Jim
If I were going to do this, I would take a look at some of the great HO scale books and magazines because I will bet you they have done it with HO or N. I might be mistaken, but I think Model Railroader had an article about building a turntable, but it would be over ten years ago.
The Atlas turntable is pretty small as it is…and around $150 I think…
I haven’t done it before, but sounds like a great scratch build project. If done, you may want to submitt it to Lionel for production. Now, a few of my own ideas for you to ponder over.For power, could the drive unit for an operating gantry crane or engine transfer table be used? To align the table with the tracks, the mechanism from an operating gateman could be used to engage a hidden pin to keep the table aligned. just a couple of different ideas. Ken
I did this, using a plastic ‘lazy susan’ for spices I found at Wal-Mart. Works for short engines - which is all I run. Power to the track used a K-line clip so I could see the power-on with its little green light. Ended up not powering the spinner because it was more fun to use the ‘armstrong’ method of moving it by hand. I’ll look for a photo.
I agree with Eriediamond. I have only seen center drives, with single wheel pairs to stabilize the outside of the table.
Please keep us posted with pics when you attack this.
Kurt
I just happend to be reading a book I bought a few train shows back. It was put out by Lionel in 1950 so I don’t think copyright will be problem.
I also looked at the existing turntables on the market.
The Atlas one looks pretty good and is priced very reasonable, The downside of the Atlas is that I’m not sure it really is beefy enough for extended use and the fact that since the bridge doesn’t overhang, the length on engine is 24" (coupler to coupler)
The Ross turntable is really sharp and appears to be very well made. Alas, it’s $1200 to $1500!
In the middle use to be Diamond and Bowser. Diamond is apparently out of the turntable business and Bowser now only offers two turntable, a 24" and 32" (cost of about $550 delivered without indexing)
This kind of leaves me with the option of building one. I’ve been going back on forth on this, trying to decide if I wanted to build a proper turntable or simplify things with using 0-27 track. Garfield, your post reminded me that I have a copy of this little book as well, that I bought several years ago in a used bookstore for $3. Thank you for taking the time to post the pages. Bowser also has some excellent diagrams of their turntable on their website as well.
I was thinking that with a 3 rail track version I would likely try and bend Gargraves to O-27 or slightly larger. The bridge constructions seems easy enough also. The hardest part is seems would be to find the right power trucks to use, maybe parts taken from a RMT beep or K-Line Superstreets van parts. The difficulty is that it needs to be small, simple, relatively cheap, powerful enough yet be able to move slowly.
Jim