The plan for my layout doesn’t include a fiddleyard, but they’re handy to have to store trains and rolling stock off-scene. Since I don’t intend to run a whole lot simultaneously, I figured I put in a small hidden fiddleyard. Normally you’d have to accessible to swap out rolling stock, but again, I don’t intend to run a whole lot of variety on this layout, so a hidden inaccessible one should be fine for my needs.
So the board is a simple rectangle, so I didn’t take additional photographs on how it is constructed. It sits upon 4 supports attached to the benchwork, which have been fixed in place with the board sitting on-top (without being fixed down to these supports) to make sure that it sits level. Test placing the points on top of this board made it obvious that I didn’t have enough length to store my intended trains (the longest I’ll run is a 2-6-2 tank engine with 4 4-wheel coaches in tow, which comes in at roughly 45cm). So the points on the left have been moved further to the left and unto the loopback board. Incidentally this means that I need 3 points on the left as the last one will connect back to the loop to be able to use it as a reversing loop for my harbour board (more on this board later, you can occassionally see it in some photos though!)
Fixing the points down, and putting the first piece of track of the fiddleyard in, it was time for a test. Not shown in the photos is a small S-bend right before the points on the left. While it is absolutely delightful to see my 2-6-2 Jeep run, the test running made it painfully obvious that one point was faulty. Circled in the red you can clearly see that it doesn’t switch all the way… I’ve tried repairing this point, but sadly enough it didn’t work. The arm that throws the blades of the point simply didn’t have the right angle to throw it far enough, and bending it enough so that it did just moved the problem to the other side…So I did the only proper thing I could do; take up these 3 points, replace the faulty point… and take out the S-bend by using a left-hand point instead of a right-hand point to go into the far-track of the fiddleyard.
So there is still work to be done on the fiddleyard. There is more track to be put down, put terminal blocks in to wire these tracks up to my controller and ofcourse, run more trains!
