Designing Interlaced Sleeper Turnouts with Templot
- Stewart McSporran, April 2008
I have been designing and building Templot templates for turnouts with
interlaced sleepers for my layout. As this has become a hot topic in some
areas I thought that I would publish my notes. While I'm targetting 2mm
finescale the general principles will apply to all scales.
Copyright, etc.
Templot is © Copyright 2005 Martin Wynne /
85A MODELS.
The instructions in this article refer to version 0.82d of Templot.
Background
An interlaced sleeper turnout is one where all (or almost all) the timbering is
simply standard 10" wide sleepers rather than the heavier and longer 12" wide
timbers. These were popular in the 19th Century mainly, it is thought, due
to their comparatively low cost compared to timbered turnouts.
Aim
This article will start from a standard Templot turnout and explain how I
convert it to one with interlaced sleepers.
I'd like to thank Jim Watt of the 2mm Scale
Association for his assistance in debugging the results of my experiments in
this area and for providing me with some appropriate NBR trunout drawings.
I will explain some of the more unusual Tempot options, but I will not cover the
basic template creation steps.
Starting Off
We begin with a standard template.
First of all use the Real > Timbering > Timbering Data… menu option to set the
width of all the timbers to 10". In this example I had the timbers square on to
the main road.
Most of the work is done from the Shove Timbers control and in the following
screen shots the blue sleepers are ones that have been manually altered
while the red one is the sleeper currently being edited.
Tip: I find it much easier to work in real world units in the Shove
Timbers control.
Start around the V crossing with the timber under the tip of the crossing nose.
This just needs its length set correctly, 108” in this case.
In 2mm FS the wing and check rail gaps are overscale. This has the effect
that the knuckle is pushed further away from the tip of the crossing than would
be the case with a true scale gap. This means that it’s not possible to
put the timbers exactly as required around the crossing. (One should be under
the tip of the crossing, the next one under the knuckle.) If the timbers
are put in these “correct” locations they just look wrong, as shown below:
Even though it’s not strictly correct it looks better if the sleepers are moved
closer to the crossing tip:
Next we turn our attention to the switch end. I leave everything up to the
heel of the switch blades as is except for the length of the timbers; which need
to be reduced to 108 inches.
The NBR diagram shows two sleepers, very close together, after the sleeper
immediately behind the heels of the switches, so we’ll deal with them now.
Aside - Lining Up The Sleeper Ends
It's very difficult to make sure that the ends of the sleepers line up correctly
without some sort of guide. It seemed that the two stock rails would make
perfect guides; if only I could work out how to position a copy of them where
the sleeper ends should be. Luckily a bit of experimenting resulted in
this very thing! So here's how to strip a copy of the turnout template
down to just one or other of its stock rails.
- Copy the template.
- Turn off snapping – Use the menu: action > F7 snap options > snap on background
templates
- Hide the timbers using the menu: real > timbering > no timbering
- Omit the track centre lines using the menu: geometry > track centre-lines
- Use the Menu: do / Omit Rails and Joints option to remove everything but the
stock rail of interest. (See below)
- Use "F7" move template to line up stock rail with sleeper ends.
- Do the same again for the other stock rail.
The screen shot below shows the two templates (nos. 46 and 49) lined up at the
sleeper ends.
Back to the Template
The goal now is to fix up all the timbering between the switch heels and the
crossing. I find this is easiest done by starting at the switch and
roughly putting the sleepers in place by making one just touch the tick marks at
the end of the adjacent sleeper. Once you've got to the crossing you can
go back and fettle them into place.
Tip: Bonus timbers are automatically lined up properly for the main road,
so I find it easiest to twist and throw the "T" timbers onto the turnout
side while using the bonus timbers on the main side.
Tip: Using the shortcut keys helps accuracy (these are the underlined
letters on the shove timbers control, e.g. L for lengthen, S for shorten).
You should now have a template similar to the following screenshot:
Finish of the remaining timbers and you'll end up with an almost complete
template (the guide templates have been removed in this picture):
The only problem now is that the check rails are too long for this prototype.
So fix this by using the real > customize V-crossing > wing and check rails...
menu option and on second data entry screen, set the check lengths to 48, 78,
108 (the defaults are 78, 108, 138).
The check rails now look much better. They don't quite line up with the
sleepers but this is easily sorted during the build.
