Cavan & Leitrim style 3ft track making

[PorkyP]

As I'm thinking in terms of a 7mm scale Cavan & Leitrim layout, or maybe big diarama due to space, I'm looking at track, now at 7mm that's 21mm gauge , (jeez even I worked that out!) ...There's some 7mm stuff out there running on regular 00 tracks at 16.5 but I reckon that's going to look a bit daft as its well under size, so I reckon the only option is to do some proper track laying at the right gauge...

Any tips on this? I guess some of you  gents have done similar, I'd be very interested to see what you've done and how you did it !...I guess maybe some normal code 100 track stripped just for the metals, and lots of sleepers lovingly hacked from wood is the way to go..?...then of course there's fixing rails to sleepers, much of the real narra gauge seemed to be simply spiked straight on to the sleepers without chairs or anything, which kind of makes it easier to represent.. again any input much appreciated.

Edited June 30, 2019 by PorkyP

[murrayec]

Hi PP

David Holman's thread on building Clogher Valley layout has some good stuff about building 7mm track;-

You can buy rails and sleepers from Peco rather than cutting up track, Marcway is also a good source. You'll need a few track gauges to set everything up and that might be a problem finding them for narrow gauge- some of the societies may sell them!

A good reference book on building track is;- 'Finescale Track in 4mm' by Ian Rice, Wild Swan Publication, ISBN 1874103003. A different scale but the approach can be applied to what your doing.....

Eoin

[PorkyP]

Thanks again Eoin, I'll check those out...I've actually got boat loads of old track that I'm quite happy to 'recover' rails from, (just like they did in real life!)  I found an interesting guide by a chap called John Clutterbuck when searching around for ideas, that's pretty good, it's geared towards the smaller Brit's NG but the method is same for any, he's using wooden sleepers and individual spikes made from staples !... Result looks very good though, would be even better in proper Irish 3ft !   a lot of patience required tho..

[jc_O14]

Thanks for mentioning me. Yes although my guide is focussed on 2ft or thereabouts the techniques would equally apply to 3ft. I would strongly recommend Karlgarin rail as it has a proper NG profile with wide head and foot - other rails are tall and thin. 

John

[David Holman]

I made Fintonagh's 21 mm track from Peco Code 83 FB rail - they sell it as conductor rail, but it works fine for copper clad track and points with both 4mm finescale wagon wheels and Slater's three foot gauge, 7mm scale wheels.

 Used Templot for point drawings. They do 'Irish EM', 20.2 mm ones, but it was easy to enlarge them to 21mm on the home printer/copier. The only difficult hot was getting a suitable roller gauge, but eventually, someone turned one for me on the club lathe.

 What I would say is even using 4mmFS standards, clearances are tight. Wheel back to backs are around 19.5mm and anything more than 0.1 mm outside that can cause derailments, whereas in broad gauge (36.75mm) on code 100 track, I can get away with nearly 0.5mm either way.