01-24-2010, 09:14 PM
Hello all;
I'm, like many, planning a new layout and am currently in the process of doing due diligence on / experimenting with various track making parts. Once I've decided, I'll make a larger purchase.
On the track front, I stumbled across Central Valley's tie strips a year or two ago, put it out of my mind, then came across them again in the last six months or so. This time I'm closer to building, so rather than just look at photos and wonder how easy / hard they are to use, etc. I decided to buy the sample pack that contains all three types they produce and experiment.
- Mainline (9')
- Branchline
- Mainline 8'6" Ties
I haven't seen a lot of images of these outside of the CV site, and since I have seen a fair number of posts (i.e. interest) about these on this board, I thought I'd share some photos.
All are common in that they come in 1 foot lengths with the ties at either end molded half thickness. Given this is styrene, you simply glue the top half of the tie at the end of one strip to the bottom half of the tie at the end of the next strip. I had this pictured completely wrong in my head, so I'm glad I bought these - I like the way this works. As a side note, the end ties have little nubs for indexing, which speeds assembly, but these nubs are not the same from type to type - i.e. you can't index one type to another (you'd have to cut the nubs off - no biggie, but I'm curious as to why it was done this way)
The end result can be bent into impressively small radiuses (the track around the radius of the image is about a 21" radius, for reference):
Cont...
I'm, like many, planning a new layout and am currently in the process of doing due diligence on / experimenting with various track making parts. Once I've decided, I'll make a larger purchase.
On the track front, I stumbled across Central Valley's tie strips a year or two ago, put it out of my mind, then came across them again in the last six months or so. This time I'm closer to building, so rather than just look at photos and wonder how easy / hard they are to use, etc. I decided to buy the sample pack that contains all three types they produce and experiment.
- Mainline (9')
- Branchline
- Mainline 8'6" Ties
I haven't seen a lot of images of these outside of the CV site, and since I have seen a fair number of posts (i.e. interest) about these on this board, I thought I'd share some photos.
All are common in that they come in 1 foot lengths with the ties at either end molded half thickness. Given this is styrene, you simply glue the top half of the tie at the end of one strip to the bottom half of the tie at the end of the next strip. I had this pictured completely wrong in my head, so I'm glad I bought these - I like the way this works. As a side note, the end ties have little nubs for indexing, which speeds assembly, but these nubs are not the same from type to type - i.e. you can't index one type to another (you'd have to cut the nubs off - no biggie, but I'm curious as to why it was done this way)
The end result can be bent into impressively small radiuses (the track around the radius of the image is about a 21" radius, for reference):
Cont...
Matt Goodman
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio