A little progress on the turntable

I’ve been mostly focused on furniture-making for the past week or so. However, while the glue was drying this evening, I managed to get a little traction on the turntable. I had cut the PC board for the turntable platform a couple of weeks ago, and was struggling to find some 1/4-28 screws that would […]

MDF is the pits

Or the pit, as is the case tonight. I just finished roughing in the turntable pit, which I ultimately decided should be concrete, not wood. The key dimension on the turntable pit is the elevation of the pit rail. Sure I’d like the pit itself to be perfectly round, but as long as it doesn’t […]

Laying out the house tracks

I had hoped to make a bunch of progress on the roundhouse tonight, but unfortunately, the Boy and I wound up talking about Bill C-51, and I had to promise to actually read the whole thing before he could relax and go to bed. Every Canadian should read it, along with the existing provisions in […]

Turntable Wiring

Some things I can visualize in my head. I can come up with a remarkably detailed construction plan on the way home on my bike. I can conceive an image and sketch it when a pen and paper are handy. Wiring, it turns out, is not like that. So it was that I was carrying […]

Getting the Turntable Ends Right

I want to solder the ends of the turntable rails so they line up nicely with the shore tracks and stay that way. At the same time, I don’t especially want to use a PC board tie at the end of the turntable because I would like the first tie to look like wood. Not […]

The Pit Wall

One of the benefits of modelling a long-gone, poorly documented prototype is that occasionally you get to choose. Maybe you could call it a “benefit.” I’m not so sure, it tends to send me into a whirlpool of research, trying to find typical practices to inform my decision. So it was today when I started […]

Turntable Thoughts

Dodging through traffic on my ride home is perhaps not the best time to be thinking about how to make the Pembroke turntable work. Indeed, usually when I’m riding my bike I can’t think about much of anything. Yet tonight I had quite a good flow of ideas. Thanks to Mayor Gregor Robertson and all […]

More Roundhouse Drafting

As I was finishing up yesterday, I realized that the roundhouse needed to come closer to the turntable a little bit so as to avoid sharp points at the pit edge. A quick review of Engine Houses & Turntables on Canadian Railways, 1850-1950 by Edward Forbes Bush (thanks for the loan, Scott), shows that a […]

Concepts for Pembroke Roundhouse

It’s really inconvenient to run all the way down to Golden Lake, the other end of staging (12 feet away) to turn the engine, and so, I’m starting to turn my attention to the Pembroke turntable. One of the first things I need to figure out is the spacing of tracks for the roundhouse, and that […]

Researching the turntable

In 1905, Pembroke had a 50’3″ turntable. Sadly it was removed in the 30’s when the passenger trains were run by a gas-electric, which was too long to fit on the turntable. So, we have no pictures of it, much less plans. From the 1908 GTR bridges and building book, we know it was almost […]