Adjusting the staging yard lift bridge wasn’t an easy task, but when decomposed into discrete steps, it was much palatable. The first steps was to remove the end tracks on the bridge itself to resurface the warped plywood surface. They were all soldered and wired with feeders. Thus I took my time, over two evening to prepare everything.
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| Resurfacing the plywood was much easier than thought |
Then the surface was sanded down with a rotative sander and final level adjustment done with wood putty to ensure a perfect surface. It took three adjustments, but I got it right and sealed everything with a good coat of paint.
Perfect vertical alignment for improved performance
Then tracks
were relaid, resoldered and rewired in place, assuring a good alignment to
prevent derailment.
When done,
I took care to finalize the bus wiring and gather all the wired together in a
bundle. This was to ensure no wire would get entangled by repeated action of
the bridge lifting motion.
A simple surface bolt took care of lateral position
I also
added a small bolt to secure the bridge lateral position. This was required
because I observed some lateral play that could be about 1.5mm. That is a huge
misalignment! I found out by accident when a steamer hit the rails full speed
and got its rods firmly stuck. This is some really nasty mechanical stuff. I
went to the hardware store and tested several surface bolts until I found one that
had minimal slack in it to ensure perfect alignment.
Adding a MDF guardrail for peace of mind against accidents
Finally, I
added a piece of MDF to act as a guardrail to prevent trains to plunge on the
concrete floor of doom. That takes away some stress to run expensive rolling
stock!
Now, I have reached a point were most tracks have been laid and are functional. I only need to address the faulty trackwork by the curved turnout located on the superelevated spot. Once this is done, it will be a matter of adding the team track and coal track in Armagh, followed by installing a few tortoises and additional wiring. I must admit I'm a little bit afraid of running trains when there is not terrain to catch a falling piece of rolling stock. It doesn't take a lot to have such an unfortunate accident and I'm not willing to take that risk.
I must admit I'm not writing that much because I feel these nuts and bolts articles are far less interesting than scenery, planning or simply modelling. I have been working on a few rolling stock projects in "secret" too, but I'm waiting a bit before sharing them since I want to focus my efforts on what matters right now.
