Deep into the ritual of track laying with the TT.
There have been some hiccups. Well, more U-turns. OK, if I’m honest, it really wasn’t working and I had to change my entire mindset. Was this a product fault? Obviously I cannot say that, but there are some changes which I have had to adapt to.
Normal procedure is to lay track the same way that I have for years with a back up/operating lever in the form of a DPDT slide switch. This works really well with most of the Peco range. Things are changing. Now we are in to fully swayed toward DCC product design. Depending on your placement within this, this could be a good or a bad thing. Below is a medium radius TT point. It has a funny frog and compared to my standard brain level OO code 100 point it has lots of funny wires running crossways underneath.
It is non-isolating. This is deal braker. It’s totally live whichever way you set it. I tried by-passing this, but gave up, and also gave up on using the DPDT switches. I had to change my head around.
If you want say, the left hand road to be a dead siding, you have to create a new section with an isolating fishplate and a switch. If it’s part of a loop, a whole new switched feed section. This for old head DC running.
However… if you assume in this case that it’s a one engine in steam branch, you’re laughing. No need to isolate anything except in the storage yard. Metal fishplates all the way around. So that’s the way I’ve gone with it. The points are for the minute operated manually (or once a year) but slots have been cut so that motors could be retro fitted.
The plain track is also a new design; code 55 like the N gauge range. This is really code 80 with a different profile. The non-visible lower curve is moulded into the sleeper base rather than sitting in chairs on the top. This makes the whole thing quite chunky with close sleeper spacing. Compared to our old friend code 100 OO she makes for a much more robust beast altogether. This was another head shift as I couldn’t visually use copper clad sleepers at the baseboard edges. The track is so robust that I think that the two pins and glue approach should be ample for all but the most violent use.
Conclusions: Different. Needs a new approach and certainly the most robust track I’ve ever used. Before I started this I did some web research to see what the TT 120 boys were doing. The vibe is definitely leaning toward trainsets, in that there is a lot of train set boxed stuff. This is largely very oval and mainline in practice. Also unsurprisingly there is a fair amount of entry level DCC. I get the feeling that it will take a while to move away from this to other places, a bit like rabbit warrens in 009 in the 70s. There is however a large groundswell, more than I expected. Certainly worth considering with the trade support rapidly growing.
