I’m building the CMR 105’ turntable. After installing all of the pit rail ties, the idea of individually painting them is daunting. The pit itself will be concrete. My question is what was the typical material that pit ties were constructed from? Just wood? Or was concrete ever used. My era is late 40’s to early 50’s.
I must be miss reading the question . If it is going to be concrete why are there ties? If it has ties they were usually real ties , dark if new or greyer if older, but cresoted for suer.
Dave
Dave is right. A turntable pit built with a concrete floor usually has the pit rail bolted directly to the concrete. Pits with a dirt floor usually use the pit rail ties, which are wood. Normally a turntable with a bridge as long as 105 feet has a concrete floor.
There are some examples of the dirt floor pit that had concrete poured later and kept the wood ties on the pit rail, so as the old saying goes, “there’s a prototype for everything.”
The one thing I noticed in you entry is the statement, “After installing all of the pit rail ties, the idea of individually painting them is daunting.” Most people would have painted them BEFORE installation. It’s much easier and give a much sharper color separation line.
Bwahahahaha! Among the many things I’ve learned since studying this hobby is that I usually find the hard way first. Perhaps with my next undertaking, I’ll be among “most people”.
If you’re planning to paint the concrete floor, too, then you can be a bit sloppy with painting the ties. Fix the problems when you do the floor paint.
I used a piece of flex track for the pit rail in my scratchbuilt turntable - Just cut the ties between the rails to a suitable length, then fasten it in place.
Wayne
Here is a concrete pit:
Dave H.
You say you’ve already installed the ties - glued? Permanent?
If not, pop them out, flip the pit over, push the ties into the underside and now you can paint the ties without painting the pit and you can paint the pit without painting the ties.
If they’re glued, you’re scr**ed.
Jcopilot
Pardon me, but I’ve seen turntable pits with only concrete walls and ring rail retaining walls, wood ties, with cinder fill under and around the ties and sloping down to the center bearing pillar. I don’t know how the real roads handled snow and ice in the northern climes, but I would imagine an all-concrete TT pit might cause problems with freezing water blocking the drains. The nice thing about cinder fill in yards and turntable pits is the fact that water passes through it, which is why the real roads used cinders so extensively (they had a lot of 'em!).
Quite a few roads built stone TT pit walls, but the earliest roads often timbered the walls with creosoted timbers. Those of us with large collections of Model Railroader magazines from the '50s saw photos of timbered TT pits, and Paul Larson did an article on constructing them in the January, '58, issue. He had two of them on his HO Mineral Point & Northern and he wasn’t alone in his choice. When I built mine for the Farley, CO, engine terminal on my old HO Colorado Western, I used stained match sticks (ah, Northwoods living: rustic, if nothing else!). The MR staff showed how to make concrete TT pit walls in one of the segments of their Great South Pass project RR.
If you left enough room between the outside ends of the ties and the pit wall, slip a sheet of thin plastic down to protect the “concrete,” hand-stain or paint the ties, then fill in around them with cinders. It ain’t elegant, but you can save the elegance for the indexing mechanism (nifty article by Don Peck on automatic turntable indexing in the July and August, '59, MRs). Sorry, but I tend to sound like Homer Simpson whenever I talk about steam facilities!
Thanks for the feedback. It looks like the easiest and best solution is a concrete wall and a cinder floor.
BTW: This CMR turntable kit is very nicely engineered. Not much detail, but very sturdy. It looks like I’ll get years of trouble free operation out of it.
P.S. When I got the Carstens Publications book, “Locomotive Terminals & Railroad Structures”–an excellent addition
What about snow clogging up the turntable? I know here in the Chicago, during the winter there is alot of problems such as getting your ass shot out by gang members along with wind burn and frost bite. snow averages a foot a hour. a turntable can easily be turned inoperable with just drifts. so how do they get around that problem?
Well, at least in steam days, there would’ve been lots of “shovel technicians” available to clean away the snow. Or, since most roundhouses had stationary boilers, a labourer with a hose from the steam line could make short work of a foot or two of snow in a turntable pit - it’d be fitted with a drainage system anyway, to take care of the melt water. Likewise, most steam locos had fittings on the boiler where a hose could be attached: useful for cleaning the running gear or ashpan and also for similar snow removal duties at facilities with only a turntable at the end of a branch line.
Wayne