I am currently building the walters modern roundhouse and I am at the point of installing the rails. The instructions just state to install rails of my choise. No comment is given on how long the rails should be. Has anyone built this roundhouse? Should I have the rails end at the beginning of the roundhouse floor or should they extend to the edge of the turntable? Also how do I insure that the rails will be gauged correctly? Thanks!!
From my initial bad experience with doing it the wrong way, let me tell you the right way to save yourself a lot of grief.
Get flextrack and completely remove the rails from the plastic ties, taking care to keep the plastic ties in one piece as much as possible. Then, line up the rails in the slots provided on the floor of the roundhouse. The rails should extend from the back of the roundhouse over the edge of the turntable pit. Use a pencil to mark the spots on the rail at the front end of the roundhouse and at the lip of the turntable. Trim the plastic ties that you removed from the rails so that you have a piece of plastic ties to fit back onto the rails.
At this point, the bare rails should still fit into the roundhouse floor and over the lip of the turntable, while the ties should fit into the space between the roundhouse and the turntable. Using a cement that will bond the metal rail to plastic, cement the rails into the slots provided on the floor of the roundhouse. The rail will be in gauge if you do it right. Hopefully, you have not cemented the roof sections to the roundhouse so that you have access to weight down the rails in the slots until the cement sets.
Once the cement has set, you should cement the rail onto the lip of the turntable pit so that the rail doesn’t stick up in the air. Otherwise, your steam engines may derail when the pony truck reachs the rail. Now, you are in business.
When I first installed rail in the round house, the rails only protruded about one inch from the roundhouse into the space between the roundhouse and the turntable. Then, I used rail joiners to the connect the track leading from the turntable to the roundhouse track. That simply provided an opportunity for derailments since it is difficult to avoid kinks where the rails join together. Believe me, you want a single piece of rail from the lip of the turntable to the back end of the round house.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the advise!! I greatly appreacite the ideas and help. Now on with the show…
richhotrain,
Thanks for you post. I’ll keep it in mind when I build my roundhouse!
richhotrain Has good advice but here a tip Before cementing the rails. Slightly bevel the inside of the rails to get better alignment at the turntable pit. I have a Walthers HO roundhouse, and instructions and a scale drawing of the inside pit area came with my roundhouse. I did not use cement on the roof, ( I will install lights inside at a later date )
makes it easy to get inside the round house at will.
Thank’s for all the great comment and suggestions!! I was able to install the rails as suggested and it worked perfectly. I also am not planning on glueing the roof on either as I too will put in details and lights later. One last question… how far should the roundhouse be from the turntable? I have read and reread the instructions and no where can I find the information. Thanks
If you are working in N scale, the Walthers turntable template specifies 1 15/16 inches between the lip of the turntable and the edge of the roundhouse. The template can be retrieved as a pdf file from the Walthers site. Good luck.