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Recently, I've been working with the guys in my work group to design a simple and inexpensive means of control turnouts. Inspired by an article which appeared in an N-scale modeling magazine I'm developing what you see here. The N-scale turnouts were controlled by toggle switches and the toggles were mounted on the top of the layout. I liked how the author routed the throw rods just under the scenery, but I did not like the mounting location of the switches, because I thought they distracted from the modeled scene. My improvements are to mount the toggles on the external fascia about 1" below the top of the fascia. The pro is that the toggle does not come into view in the modeled scene. The disadvantage is that the turnout stick into the isle roughly an inch. The challenge was building the pedestal on which to mount the turnouts. The pedestal had provide mounting for the toggle, location for routing wires, be smooth to reduce impact on the isle space and be durable to bumping. The prototype pedestals were laminated from 6 pieces of wood. Since the Don Rigling has made 2 foot long sticks by laminating only 4 pieces of wood. He has a router or shaper to round the outer edes, I had to use quarter rounds. One plus of these throws is the positive indication of turnout direction. By painting the toggle mounting screws red and green, the toggle indicates preferred alignment. I have a few locations where I'd like to control turnouts from both sides of the layout. In those cases, I think I can route an extra wire through the layout to a faux slide switch. Free-mo also requires that turnouts can be controlled from both sides of a module. I'm considering the use of this control for my free-mo modules too. The draw backs to using for free-mo is that the pedestal adds width to the module and could get hit while transporting. Stay tuned for further developments.
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