Spokane & BC Railway Circa 1955

Modelling what might have been in southeast BC and northwest Wasington

Month: June 2025

Grand Forks turntable saga – Part 1: Problems with the Walthers kit

A turntable at Grand Forks was always part of the layout plan, but it took a while for me to get “around to it”. I decided on the simple Walthers 90′ kit as I was not in favour of scratchbuilding one. I figured that as it was widely available and had been on the market for a number of years, it should at least prove to be a decent basic unit, even it not powered. Newer versions are now available that arrive completely assembled, and include an electronic indexing system, but those were not yet out when I purchased my kit.

I decided to just assemble the kit as carefully as possible, according to the instructions, even though there were some aspects to the parts that gave me pause. A turntable is a very basic animal, but it has to be quite precise in a couple of aspects. It must rotate smoothly and stay where it stops, as there is not much room for error side-to-side if the locomotive is to stay on the rails. The height of the ends of the table must match very closely the height of the fixed track rails as well. This is all regardless of whether or not the unit is powered or rotated by hand.

Unfortunately, the assembled kit failed in all of these aspects, due to three major areas. First, the small wheels at the ends of the table that ride on the circular ring-rail were very badly formed during the plastic casting process. This caused the table to ride up and down as it rotated, due to the eccentric shape of the wheels. This caused the table to “cog” as it rotated, tending to a favour positions where the wheels were at a low spot. Accurate positioning was all but impossible. Second, the main bearings for the table shaft were very sloppy and would allow the table to move about side-to-side rather than maintaining an accurate centre position. This translated to significant movement at the ends of the table, again, making accurate positioning impossible. And finally, the gear drive for the motorization kit would not stay in mesh, rendering the power drive useless. The first two of these were corrected, and the motorisation was abandoned.

It was obvious that the table wheels and the centre bearings were flawed by simple visual inspection, but the drive gear required some more investigation to determine why it would not stay in mesh. There were two possible issues, only one of which could be corrected. The centre hole might be off-centre, which would be simple to fix, but if the outer edge of the gear was not circular, then it would never stay in mesh regardless of how well centred the hole was. Unfortunately it suffered from both of these problems, so I decided to abandon that part.

The solution to the poor centre bearings seemed to be to use ball bearings, but the issue was how best to mount and align them. The table wheels just needed new ones carefully turned on the lathe to have minimal play.

One other issue was that way that power was conducted up to the table rails. It used a pair of brass slip rings that were very difficult to get aligned correctly, even after they were rebuild a couple of times. The main problem was that the bits were mounted on the turntable pit base, the centre shaft of the table, and the plastic cover that held the lower bearing. It was impossible to see how well everything lined up because it was all inside the cover, so it took lots of trial and mostly error attempts to get it just right, sort of.

The dual ring design did not provide any means to reverse the track polarity of the table, which would have required something like an automatic reverser or even a manual switch (error prone!). This all had to go and a much better means devised for powering the table.

When I was assembling the kit, following the instructions, I had a bad feeling that it just might not work out so well that I decided to fasten together some of the major sub-assemblies with screws rather than gluing them, just in case!. Very fortuitous decision, as it did have to come apart many times during the investigations and rebuilding.

By this point, I was so fed up with messing with the turntable that it would be almost 4 years until I finally got back to tackling its problems. All of that process is detailed in Part 2 of this saga.

Track switch machine controls or why can’t I find a 40+ year old switch?

Waaaay back in about 1979 there was a group of us who frequented an electronics store in Seattle called Radar Electronics. Someone found some neat toggle type switches that were used in audio applications, and thought they might work for controlling track turnouts. A variety of designs emerged, but most seemed too complicated for me, so I set about to come up with a very basic one that would be simple, reliable, and easy to assemble. I am in favour of having a small slot under the turnout throw bar and a stiff spring wire that comes up from below and moves side to side with just enough tension to keep the point firmly to one stock rail or the other. Other ideas used bell cranks, rotating bits, etc, but they seemed more than what was required to simply move the points from side to side. If you wanted a rotating switch stand that was a different issue, something that I have chosen to avoid.

Back to the toggle switches. They may have been sold individually for a price that is long forgotten, but the best deal was a box of 200 for $50.00, or 25 cents a piece, what a bargain! Needless to say everyone bought a box.

My simple design involves a piece of 0.025” or 0.030” piano wire plus two mounting brackets made from aluminum angle stock. The electrical part of the switches was basically a slide switch, and I have never liked them for reliability, plus they are not designed to handle much current, being mainly for audio applications. I decided on snap-action micro switches which are designed for higher current and are extremely reliable because of their snap-action internal design. One (or two, I’ll get to that part shortly) were simply screwed to the bottom of the subroadbed plywood and actuated by the lever on the audio switch. Short wires lead up to the track stock rails and the frog so that every inch of rail is live.

One thing worth mentioning is that it looks from the photos that I have soldered the spring wire to the handle of the toggle switch. This is true, but I don’t trust a simple solder connection so I put a 90 degree bend in the end of the spring wire, put it through a hole in the end of the handle, and then wrap regular bare hook-up wire around it tightly and then solder it all together. This encases the end of the spring wire in a layer of soft wire that is all soldered together. I have never had one come loose.

As for the need for two switches, this arises with the older Shinohara style turnouts that have a solid metal bar connecting the points to each other and then to the frog. This resulted in a large portion of the turnout that was powered as a single frog from the switch machine below. Now those points act as a switch when they touch their adjacent stock rail, and we have the micro switch below deck also trying to switch the frog. Because the micro switch transitions very quickly and no dead space, one or the other position ends up with a short circuit as the turnout points and the micro switch are both supplying power and get out of phase. The simple solution is to install two micro switches in such a way that as the points move from one side to the other the first micro switch opens, usually before the point has left the stock rail, and then the other micro switch closes sometime later as the point arrives at the other stock rail. This design has worked flawlessly on many Shinohara turnouts for many years. All of them are considered to be “not DCC friendly” but I have never had any problems using them with DCC and all sorts of rolling stock. It is all in how you handle powering the frog. In fact, that solid throw bar that is seen by some to be a source of grief, helps with the power supply to the points and frog. The switch frame below can be wired to the micro switches so that the spring wire driving the points provides a third route to power the points and frog. All it takes is the “break before make” design accomplished with two micro switches.

For other turnout designs that connect each point rail to its adjacent stock rail and only the actual frog needs to be reversed, one SPDT micro switch will suffice as it will route either stock rail to the frog as appropriate. This design has also been working flawlessly for many years with PECO and other turnouts.

These assemblies are operated with yet another simple design utilizing RC airplane parts, namely their 2-56 threaded clevises, threaded rod, and 1/4” wooden dowels. All of this idea was borrowed from Jim Petro down in Reno NV. Thanks Jim! I have used a few of the nylon control surface push-rods as well for hard to reach places that can’t have a direct straight dowel.

I also stole Jim’s idea for using PVC pipe end caps as recessed holders for the dowels so that the face of the fascia can remain clear and smooth. I even managed to track down and order several boxes of the exact make of PVC caps that he used because they were so much nicer than the ones locally available.

All of this is shown in the accompanying photos.

Now, the part about trying to find new switches? Well, I decided to see if there was anything available on the market today that would work in a similar manner to my 40 year old switches. Their application in audio amplifiers is long gone, with everything being computer controlled. I managed to source a bunch of sort-of similar switches directly from China after searching through hundreds of pictures of different models. I made a small mock-up to try them out and I believe that they will work just fine, along with the micro switches, but I have not installed any yet as I am still working on my stash from 40 years ago. Time will tell.

As for sourcing the micro switches, these used to be available from the many electronic equipment suppliers, many selling surplus stock, but all of them have now closed. There used to be a whole bunch in the San Francisco Bay area, but one by one they all closed. I was fortunate to secure quite a number on various trips down there, so again I should be well stocked for a quite a while. I am sure that suitable micro switches are also available online, probably from China.

Curlew and the quest for flat plywood

The town of Curlew WA was the most recent to be built and while loosely following the arrangement of the real Curlew, several liberties were taken to increase the number of industries serviced by the railway. As such, the model version ended up mostly flat with a lot of tracks. This suggested that maybe a different style of construction was warranted.

All of the previous benchwork construction is traditional L-girder with joists and two layers of narrow, laminated 3/8” plywood for the track sub-roadbed. This worked very well for Grand Forks and the mountainous areas, but it required a lot of fill-in between the tracks for buildings in town. So, I thought I’d try to laminate large sheets of 3/8” plywood to cover the entire area, with the thickness matching the main roadbed at the edges. I didn’t want to use the readily available modern pine plywood because it has a very thin veneer on both surfaces that makes it hard to plane down to get precise joints. I have always used good old fir plywood, so that’s what I went in search of. It seems to only be available at specialty lumber yards these day, so ok, a trip into Burnaby for a few sheets. Well, soon after getting them home I noticed a distinct curl to them, but I figured that with glue and clamps they would flatten out nicely. Big mistake! I soon realized that decent flat fir plywood is a thing of the past.

Cutting a very long story short about trying to flatten it, suffice it to say that even with a LOT of glue, clamps, and a laser level to check everything the stuff was so resistant to flattening out, that it was lifting up the entire benchwork at one point because of the strength of the clamps trying to bend it down. Everything just came up instead. That was solved with a lot of weights and patience. I did find out how great laser levels are in a darkened room where you can split the thickness of the beam on the edge of a bunch of 1×4″ pine blocks. Good enough for our work!

The joint between the sheets required quite a lot of planing to flatten it out where the tracks would cross, but thanks to the thick plys of the fir plywood, that worked just fine.

In the end it all worked out and is almost level throughout to prevent cars from rolling away.

Where in the heck is Darestof??

As you may know my layout is a work of historical fiction that is located in southeastern BC and northeastern Washington. That makes it very easy to select place names without needing to invent any. One name that appears in various places about the layout is the town of “Darestof”, which at the moment is at the end of the completed benchwork of the unfinished line southward into Washington. This name does not appear on any maps, current or historical. Suzy came up with the name one day and it stuck. It simply means “Da rest of the World”. This module is made from a 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood and is designed to be moveable as the layout grows. It will always be the end of the line of whatever the current state of the layout is, and provides industries for switching plus a two track return loop to make operations easier.

The idea came to me a long time ago when I got tired of running train to the end of the track and then backing them up into town. I actually built two versions when there was two unfinished ends, but now that the staging track loops are in place, only one is needed for the remainder of the layout’s progress.

The first version was smaller with very tight curves, but did the job. It never had a name. 

Version 2.0 was larger and an earlier version of the current Darestof, but was on the opposite side of the plywood, being mostly a mirror image. The problem was that all of the track switches were on the far side from the aisle, so they were a bit awkward to operate, hence the reversal to the current configuration.

In 2018 Version 2.1 was made by flipping over the plywood and redoing the track so that the switches would be closer to the aisle. It was also moved further along to make way for the new town of Curlew.

The one drawback with the current arrangement of tracks is that while the track switches are handy along the front edge of the module, the basic direction of the curves makes it a bit awkward to position it in the room. It really should curve to the right as you approach it, but it curves to the left, requiring some messy extra curves on approach. Because of this, I may consider re-doing it yet again when it is time to reposition it. We shall see when the time comes.

Restarting posting

The last post on this blog was in December 2020! A variety of life events plus things like Covid-19 conspired to get in the way, and like a lot of things in life, since the momentum was gone, it was hard to regain it.

I had to make the decision to either shut it down completely and save some money, or revive it and start posting again. I have decided to do the latter, because I really enjoy sharing what I am doing. It also serves as a repository of what has happened, and a platform to share other things that are too big to send via email.

So, here we go again. I will be posting a few “catch-up” articles that should have been posted over the intervening years. Better late than never I guess.

And I will start a simple email address list that will be used to send out notification of new updates. You can request to be added by using the About page on the website. Nothing automatic, I’ll just add people by hand. I am not expecting there to be throngs of thousands wanting to be included!

My sincere hope is that maybe one of my posts will in some small way inform or entertain other people.

Calendar equivalents for 2025

Continuing my tradition of hanging old calendars that match the current year in order to enhance the period feel around the layout, I present the equivalents for 2025.

Full year:
1902, 1913, 1919, 1930, 1941, 1947, 1958, 1969, 1975, 1986, 1997, 2003, and 2014

If that is not enough, you can also match only the first two months or the last ten months:

January-February only:
1908, 1936, 1964, 1992, and 2020

March-December only:
1924, 1952, 1980, and 2008