Fiddling About.

For the last week or so, I've been working on a cassette fiddle yard for the layout, which will hopefully make operation a lot smoother and avoid unnecessary handling of rolling stock.

The cassettes will be made of 10mm L-section brass, epoxied to 4mm ply.

Each cassette is 13" long, as this comfortably fits a train of 5 vehicles and a loco.

A lot of the work has consisted of figuring out lengths, heights and general design of the connection between the cassettes and the layout.

Progress so far has reached the stage where I've made the transition section from cassettes to rail, this was done by first cutting a piece 15mm x 0.75mm approx from two pieces of brass L-section and soldering on short lengths of rail to match the Peco track. 

A jig from scrap wood and card was made and hair grips used to hold the parts in place dduring soldering:

The two soldered assemblies are shown below:

To keep all the various bits where they should be, I made a sort of apron from play, to which the transition was epoxied:

Next job is to build the tray the cassettes will sit on...