Nailing down the track

Yet another novelty for me - nailing model railway track down. With the hand built stuff we attach one rail to the sleepers, glue these down and then add the second rail. You can't do that with Peco, it has to go down in one go. Glue isn't an option either unless you use superglue as it doesn't grab fast enough.

With a roundy-roundy, the ends of the tracks have to meet up. In this case the main element that was going to affect alignment was the point. Peco have introduced a new range of "mainline" narrow gauge points in response to those modeller who have argued that the hobby has moved on from rabbit-warren layouts to much more prototypical formations. The new points are therefore longer then the old ones and in this case, a larger radius than the rest of the circuit.

With the point being the linchpin, the lengths of flexi were connected to each end of it using fishplates (it's years since I've used these too) ans the who lot shoved around until I was happy everything would line up OK and be reasonably smooth. Peco pins were pushed in through holes drilled in the sleepers. By not hammering these home I was able to pull them out every time I realised the track was in the wrong place - which was quite a lot.

One of the last jobs was to cut the rails back. A peircing saw loaded with a fine blade worked a treat for this and gave me cuts that didn't need cleaning up to fit the fishplates.