Rebuilding the Blacklog Wye

Some years ago I acquired on eBay a beautiful hand laid wye, once part of an anonymous HOn3 layout. Perhaps the builder had passed away, or been forced to dismantle his model railroad for some reason. At the time I bought it, the wye didn't really fit on my standard gauge Blacklog Valley Railroad.  The ballast and scenery had a definite western character.  I had only begun to tinker with the idea of adding an HOn3 section based on the East Broad Top narrow gauge railroad, but the wye was so impressive I couldn't resist.  So for a number of years, while I did little more than add Tortoise switch machines, the wye sat gathering dust.

When we moved to Cape Cod, I found myself with an empty 20 x 17 room waiting for me to fill it with a model railroad.  Along the way, I also had purchased several brass models of EBT engines, as well as the gas-electric M-1 and a pile of narrow gauge rolling stock.  The model railroad that emerged was a combination HO/HOn3, with a dual gauge yard and space at one end to include -- you guessed it -- a dual gauge wye!  I inserted the wye at the end of the Blacklog yard, with the tail track wrapping around a mountain and quarry, and a brickyard on the opposite side.  Here you can see the wye with the mountain on the right and the refractory on the left, while a conveyor belt soars above.

Almost immediately, I began to encounter problems with the wye.  The hand laid trackwork, especially around the dual gauge turnouts, was beginning to show its age.  Rails came loose, and the original ties were so old they failed to hold new spikes.  The techniques used for constructing the switches were decades out of date.  The wye was built long before anyone thought of soldering rails to PC board ties.

There was frustration over keeping the rails in gauge.  A key problem area was the "draw track" on one leg of the wye, where the narrow gauge rail moved from left to right to allow the tracks to meet the switch correctly after turning.  Engines and cars derailed constantly.

Part of the problem was that the wye was constructed on a sheet of 1/2 inch plywood with cardboard under the ties.  The rest of the layout was built on 2 inch foam with cork roadbed.   The rails on the wye were not at the same height as the rails on the foam, and I was constantly fiddling with rail height.

As beautiful as the wye appeared, it was not particularly reliable for operating model trains.  I wanted the narrow gauge railroad to move cars prototypically, hauling empty hoppers from Blacklog to Robertsdale, turning the train on the narrow gauge wye there, then pulling strings of loaded hoppers back to Blacklog where the coal was cleaned and transfered to standard gauge hoppers.  The engines would then be turned on the Blacklog wye and the whole process would repeat.   Maintenance of the dual gauge wye soon became a constant problem, making operation less than enjoyable.  Something had to be done.

My first idea was to tear up the two legs of the wye leading to the wye switch and tail track, and replace them with Shinohara code 70 HOn3 track and a #3 Shinohara wye turnout.  I reasoned that the change would simplify the trackwork and replace the undependable hand laid track with commercial flex track.  I wanted to leave the main line dual gauge track since there was a long section of three rail trackage on the far side of the wye, including a dual gauge spur serving a brewery.  However, the rails between the switches would be removed and replaced with Micro Engineering weathered flex track.

Once the tracks were properly laid, wired, tested and ballasted, scenery was reapplied to the wye to disguise the damage caused by removal of the two dual gauge legs.  The result was pleasing to the eye, as can be seen in this photo of the altered wye.

Unfortunately, while the commercial components of the wye worked as expected, I had overlooked one little problem:  The entire wye still depended on two ancient, hand laid dual gauge turnouts.  The issues that confronted me with the original (all dual gauge) wye were still there, as soon as a locomotive encountered one of the hand laid switches.  Derailments were not eliminated; if anything, they were worse than before.  All the handling during the conversion had only made the switches more unreliable.

You might ask why I didn't simply replace the original hand laid turnouts by building new ones, using PC ties and modern methods.  The answer is two-fold.  First, the only remaining components of the original dual gauge wye were the turnouts.  There was a certain nostalgia in wanting to preserve some trace of the original track work.  Second, even though I am pursuing the NMRA achievement certificate in civil engineering, which includes building several switches, I wasn't prepared to take on anything as complex as a dual gauge turnout built to exactly fit the space on my layout.  At least, not at that point in time.

After having struggled with the same problems for years, I finally decided it was time for drastic action.  I would remove the entire wye -- the plywood base, the original turnouts, and the newly laid flex track, and replace the hole in my layout with a block of 2 inch foam on which I would lay a completely new, narrow gauge wye, using all commercial components.  Before I had a chance to change my mind, the deed was done.

In my next post, I will describe, step by step, how I built a replacement wye, some of the issues I encountered along the way, and what I did about the remaining dual gauge track extending beyond the wye.