Code 25 frog and guardrails

The biggest surprise for me when making this turnout was how easily it went together. The PC board ties were cut to length and bonded to a thick sheet of styrene with CA. After soldering the rails in place, I removed the excess copper cladding to leave "tie plate"-sized pads. Although this weakens the bond between cladding and board, with so many of them, the overall strength is more than adequate.

Note the tighter tie spacing in the frog area: this exactly matched AREA specifications, as shown in Randy Gordon-Gilmore's railroad turnout drawings. But how often do you see turnouts modeled this way, much less manufactured this way? For the next generation I will fill in the frog flangeways for improved appearance, just as I had done for the Code 40 frogs I had made nearly fifteen years earlier.

To properly gauge the rails, I needed to modify an NMRA gauge to tolerances that matched the wheelset profile more accurately, so my turnouts are definitely not made to any popular modeling standards. A skeleton car is a vital tracklaying aid, by the way.

The PC board ties were ordered from Clover House, P.O. Box 62, Sebastopol, CA 95473, product number 260 (mail order only). An alternative source is Fast Tracks, but their ties are cut to the longest length needed for a turnout, which means a lot of material is wasted; the Clover House ties come in foot-long strips, so there is almost no waste.

Image specs: This image was captured with a Canon 20D digital SLR.

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