I’ve been threatening to build some N-club end loops for several years.  Well, it’s finally happened!  We scrapped a puppet theatre at church, and it was made of nice 6mm ply, of sufficient size to cut the baseboard out in a single piece.  The board was constructed in my usual manner – screw the top to the loft floor to keep it flat, and build up the frame in-situ.  Some holes were added to the cross pieces to cut the weight of the thing.

And the final board…

With trackbed added.  N-club uses a 3mm thick track bed.  I use laser quality ply – expensive but accurate in thickness.  I wanted to use code 80 Peco Setrack for some of the loops, but N-club uses code 55.  The difference in height of code 80 and code 55 is near enough 1mm – so the code 80 sections used 2mm ply track bed.  The board was primed, and the loops marked out.  Nothing like a home made trammel for this job.

Next, tracklaying.  And checking the end of the board against another module.

Nearly there….

Point operation is manual, and a set of isolating switches allow trains to be held in the loops.  I like making a control panel with a choc-block between the switches and the wider layout.  Easier to wire up and correct if something goes wrong.  Typical Bartlett wiring – I had some nasty short circuits before reversing two wires!

Test run – nearly lost that Warship!!

And next job – tidy up the workbench.