I hadn’t planned for a turn table when I put the track down for my rail yard. I wanted to be able to support turning a SD70 so I needed about 3 feet of track. Came up with this design.
I like it. It is a combination of a turntable and a slide table.
Will you be decorating it to make it appear like it might actually be a real prototype thing or will you leave it as a more functional piece?
thats a cool design Nicholas. simple easy to build and looks like it will work quite well. Probably will not twirl it that fast when a Locomotive is on there, lol
Nicolas Teeuwen… That is one sweet idea. Thanks for the video.
May have to make a small change at our set up area. (https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
Our guys sometime set up there Eng’s and rolling stock going the wrong way due to we have to back a Trains down backwards to the layout.
We have to go to other end of the layout to turn a large Eng. around.
Again… that’s a neat idea. (https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-sealed.gif)
I have painted the PVC boards. I will be using construction adhesive to glue acrylic sheets to all the places where the two boards rub and spraying it with a teflon coating to make sure it slides nicely.
For now I intend to just make it functional but eventually I may try to decorate it up to make it look like a real turn table.
Initially I was thinking I would need a lazy susan and some sort of wheels to support the sliding but I suspect its going to move just fine on its own.
Nice! A “Rotating Transfer Table”. I’ll bet a prototype exists, somewhere? I used custom built 1/8 inch aluminum plating for the turntable at “Cat Dump” it gets ballast grit between the plates and needs to be cleaned out, if not used for awhile. This turntable now sits at the edge of the Evansville Yard on Andy Clarke’s “Bluestone Southern”. I’ll have to see if I can dig up an old picture. The plastic material would be a natural bearing, but if outside, I suspect it will still get grit between the surfaces.
Different!
Its called a transfer table.
I always thought if it slides back and forth its known as a “traverser”
WIKI>>>>>
In Europe there were traversers at the terminal platforms at Birmingham Moor Street station (UK) and at the former Gare de la Bastille terminus in Paris. These were installed to release locomotives from arriving passenger trains to the adjoining track. They had three parallel tracks on the table so that whichever positions the traverser was in an incoming passenger train would not be faced with a void.
Traversers were used at metropolitan termini located in confined sites, such as Kew and St Kilda in suburban Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which worked only two tracks.
In 2013 the Port of Felixstowe UK installed a traverser across nine tracks at its new North Terminal as ordinary points could not be fitted while allowing 35-wagon trains of shipping containers.[1]
Here’s an example of a Transfer Table at The California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.
That temporary crossing is interesting. They put diamonds in there a few years ago. This must have been just before that.