I’ve been tinkered with this small layout a few different times. It’s mostly been a test bed for the HOn30 track work I have been making. I thought I had some good railroad ties designed but it had some issues and was a little hard to use. So I redesigned it and when I did - my little test layout had many electrical gremlins pop up. I was lazy and didn’t really wire it properly. So with both of those things I decided to restart this little guy again. I’ve matured in my track laying so it seemed like a good time to a redo and do it right. The focus would be a F&SM Franklin (Jacobsen) Watchworks I bought awhile back. So I decided to make it an F&SM tribute in HOn30.
First picture was the small layout before I ripped up the track. Notice there were no switches here.
I ripped this up… when the electrical gremlins reared their ugly head.
Then I built a 3d model of a number 4 wye in a similar method
@Chris333 did for his Nn3 layout. I really like this method of building turnouts. I FDM printed some rail filing jigs and then start soldering and threading rail. It went pretty fast compared to full soldered turnouts.
With the turnout created and the old rail and ties pulled up I started over with the new 3d printed tie strips. I took about 2-3 iterations to get the rail spacing better. Then I started laying rail and turnout.
The marker circle is where the next part with the switch stand comes in.
Things were running well so I revisited an old design I had made for n scale. It’s a switch stand that sits on top of an SMD SPST (maybe it’s a SPDT?) switch. It’s a small switch that handles the current for the frog fine and you simply push the switch and stand back and forth on top of the ties to switch the track.
The linkage wire path in red
The switch stand base that sits on top of the SMD switch.
Here is the current state after painting the track. Next up the washes over the ties.
