Learning from a Master – Brian Pate’s KMR

Brian Pate is a master model railroader. Surprisingly he doesn’t have the designation from the NMRA, but nobody who knows him would argue that he is otherwise. I believe he is perhaps the only person to have won the gold award at two national NMRA conventions. So, when we learned that he and his wife […]

Turntable wiring made simple

Turntables obviously need to reverse polarity of their rails. In the bad old days, people used to use all sorts of tricks to switch the polarity. One could use a split ring rail and opposing wipers, or a manual switch with DCC, but in either case, the engine sound will cut out briefly. It’s much […]

Turntable locks

Tonight I redid the lock sockets on the turntable, and this time they seem to work much better. Before starting, however, I had to get the turntable itself more firmly fixed to the lazy susan base. To accomplish this, I took the big risk of disassembling everything. Recall that the lazy susan has to be […]

Another turntable alignment mystery

It was going great! I was confidently soldering socket after socket onto the lazy Susan, using a temporary pin to align them with the fixed tube. It was going so well, in fact, that I thought I might get on to soldering up the electrical connections tonight. Well, not so fast. When I had soldered […]

Turntable locks do-over

As I was congratulating myself on a job well done the other night, I had a terrible thought: what if the lock sockets don’t clear the drive wheel as they’re rotating around the far side of the turntable? I quickly got out a green Fineliner and propped it into a corner of the square hole […]

Pretty precise parts to lock turntable

To make the sockets and guide that enable the alignment pin to lock the turntable in each of the six positions, I fashioned a crude little mitre box from a piece of maple. Starting with a sacrifice socket, I figured out the correct length and angle, and cut that angle into the block of maple. […]

The Plan for Indexing the Turntable

On the real Armstrong turntables I’ve seen, there is a plate that the crew can slide across the gap to keep the rails aligned. I see the manual indexing of my model as an opportunity to replicate this activity, as well as providing positive alignment for the turntable. When I originally thought about this, I […]

Turntable passes the truck test

Just a quick post tonight, as it’s past pumpkin time. The remaining rails all went on without issues. Aligning the turntable by eye, I can send a truck through any of the three routes without issue. Reversing the turntable has the same outcome. Pleasantly surprised for once.

Roundhouse rails proceeding according to plan

The cunning plan appears to be working, although like everything else on my model bench, slower than hoped! Still, I’m happy with the first stall, and the first rail on the second stall looks nicely lined up with both ends of the turntable. I’m now positioning the second set of Vs, and you can see […]

Plan for aligning remaining turntable rails

The roundhouse tracks for Pembroke meet at the edge of the turntable in a ‘V.’ This, I think, is a little unusual for model turntables, and now that I’m about to start on them, I can see why: they require some careful construction or else they’re just not going to work! The key is going […]