Swiss Chris Railways
Bondale Junction
Bustham Station
Bontal
Home
York
Model
Railways
BONDALE - “YORK” STATION
“York” yard or station. This is the storeage area for the layout with a Y connection for out and
back running. These run to Bondale junction (top Left) and Bonton (Bottom Left). It also acts as
the rest of the world. As this was designed to be a non-scenic area, the OHLE is home-made and
can be seen in the photographs. When I started construction, I realised that the original site of
the turntable was to small, so it was moved to the other end of the board. I also added some
spurs at the throat end for loco / stock storage.
The station throat at York. The right hand line at the top of
the picture goes off to Bonham, and the left hand line
(truncated in the photo) goes off to Bonton. This photo
shows the home built (and working) catenary. The
locomotives are, from left to right, DB BR01-220 4-6-2 Pacific
(Fleischmann), BLS AE 8/8 273 (Hag) SBB A3/5 604 (Lilliput),
BR 60163 "Tornado" and LNER 4468 "Mallard") (both
Bachmann). Notice the Lima D9600 "Claydon" in the
background
Further down the York board showing a modification to the
catenary, with the cross section made from copper wire
soldered to the 1/4" brass tube uprights. The stock in the
picture is, from Left to Right), Eurocity Gottardo RaBe set,
SBB AE 3/6 (both Lima) SBB BE 6/8 Krokodil (Märklin Hamo)
LMS / BR Night Mail, Class 9F 92221 (both Hornby), Midland
Pullman (Bachman), BR APT/E and Javelin 395 class in
Olympics livery (Hornby)
Because the exit from the board forms a Y with the main circuit, I felt this might cause problems
with short circuits, so initially, I was going to have the board completely isolated from the main
part of the layout. This caused problems because of the lack of continuity. This has been solved
by using an insulfrog Y (Peco). Because it is impossible for both sides of the inner Y to be
connected simultaneously, and the outer sides can be kept isolated by the use of nylon rail
joiners, The stock now runs cleanly between the boards.
The working catenary was created by the
use of Peco Code 100 rail soldered to brass
1/4" tubing, then more rail is soldered to
the underside of the cross bars. I am also
experimenting with a copper wire variant of
the crossbar, which after a modification
now works perfectly. The rail came from
sections of track damaged when I
dismantled my previous layout.
York as built. The turntable is a Hornby motorised unit. The points are all Peco and are motorised with, at the right hand end
and the Y with Peco PL-10 motors, and the double slips use the Peco Smart Switch system, which was interesting to set up.