The cars are 1/32 scale. The rail track is mine , I built it along with my son .
The rail track is based on the design of the original
1954 Southport rail track. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.davies4
At the beginning of 2000, I was given two of Walkden Fisher's rail car chassis. planning to have both restored,
I needed somewhere to run them as for the last
twenty years I'd been looking for original rail cars with know providence,
which are incredibly difficult to get hold of. The original plan was to build a small display
track purely to be able to run the cars. This quickly grew into a rather more ambitious project
to recreate the original Southport rail track as during my research I
realised I really liked the shape of the original track and the way it curved back on itself.
If I'd have known then how difficult it would be to handform complex
curves on straight rails I wouldn't have bothered! We decided that the track had to be
portable so it was built in five sections, easily transportable. This probably
doubled, at a stroke, the amount of work. we used Beech faced Marine ply
as I intended the track to last indefinitely. I was given a section of the original rail used
to build the track. It then was a question of trying to hunt down a modern
substitute of almost identical size as I wanted original cars to be able to run on the newly
constructed track. This added considerably to the cost of the project as the
only rail that was available was Pico O Gauge - very expensive to buy in meter lengths
and had to be specially ordered. firstly, we cut the boards into the appropriate
sizes, then steel and brass rod doweled them so that they would fit perfectly together,
as well as using a series of steel plates to ensure the track is perfectly level.
This took considerably longer than we'd envisaged. When the rail finally arrived we test
fixed one length by drilling holes in the track every three inches, fixing down
brass screws by hand (we'd decided early on to build it as they would have originally
built it, with similar tools) and soldering the rail to the top of each screw.
This took two soldering irons and three people to do every joint as the rail conducted away
the heat very rapidly and it had to be absolutely flush with the surface of the board.
After we'd laid the first piece of rail we were all pleased how easy it was going
to be. How wrong I was! The next task was to draw the lanes out, with three
inch centres as this was what had been used originally and three lanes. The lanes were
drawn out by sticking a nail in the board and using pencil and string as
we believe this was in the original spirit. It took forever to get the compound curves to match
up to each other using this method! Once we'd finished drawing the
track out we started to lay the rail. This was an amazing amount of work and we worked from
ten in the morning til the early hours of the following morning many days.
It still took months. Finally we finished laying all the rail. We then wired up the track,
another huge task was every piece of rail had to be connected by soldering wires
between them and the boards had plug and sockets for the electrical connectors.
After this, the track was painted and it was amazing how completely this
transformed it's appearance. After two coats of sandtex the track was so abrasive it would
take the skin off your finger if you ran it along the track. This gave absolutely
brilliant traction to the older tyred cars but made it impossible to use soft compound
tyres as they wore out too quickly. We finally finished the track at the end of August.
The track worked brilliantly first time out and is exceptionally satisfying to race
on.
