On these pages you will find photos and/or drawings of some of the projects we are working on, or have completed.
As part of what I needed to do prior to SuperTrain, all of the Kato expandable connectors needed a modification. When two tables go together and the Kato track has a bit of a hump in it, that can cause a piece of the Kato track to stick up, creating a very small vertical piece of track which was enough to stop some engines when their low hung snow plows hit the vertical piece and stop dead! While this didn’t affect a lot of engines it would affect some. The solution is to take the expandable piece apart and file down the offending piece of track putting in a nice curve so that when that snow plow hits, it’ll ride up the curve rather than stop dead. This work requires every one of our current 40 expandable track joiners worked on. The joiner piece needs to be disassembled and the track carefully filed, then reassembled.
We start with a pile of Kato Expandable Joiners (KEJ). Note that they have “CAN” in red not he bottom and these are our “standard” insulated joiners, designed to work with our modules.
(future link)
One of the features of the new Fiddle Yard is to have LEDs embedded in the track in each siding so that when that siding is powered the red LEDs light up to show that the track is powered. The plan is to have an LED at each end of the Fiddle Yard demarcating the power zone. That section of track is isolated from the turnouts so you can easily see what track is powered and what isn’t. However, Kato doesn’t have track like this so work has to be done.