Slow ahead!

As the captain of a ship or indeed the Star Ship Enterprise would say when entering unchartered waters - Slow ahead! That is exactly what I am having to do with my Last Great Project 00 gauge layout. When I started building the layout over two years ago I decided to make it movable. The idea was that the baseboards could be separated and the layout moved out of the Man Cave. Now this involves having breaks in the scenery - relatively simple to do - and breaks in the track - not so easy. I have built layouts before with breaks in the track. Chalkdon, my 009 narrow gauge layout is one of them, so I know the basics. However with Chalkdon there were just two breaks in the track. With the 00 gauge layout there are about 26! So the method I use to make the joints has to be robust and easy to replicate.

At the baseboard joints I will be replacing two of the plastic track sleepers either side of the join with some copper clad fiber sleepers. The rail can be soldered to the copper clad sleepers making a strong joint - certainly stronger than the plastic sleepers. I am laying the track on a 6mm foam underlay and the track will be glued to that. However the foam underlay will not be suitable to fasten the copper clad sleepers to so I will need to substitute the underlay with some 6mm plywood cut to size. The photo below shows the basic principal.

Having cut a sample piece of plywood to further test this uncharted idea it seemed fine.

Putting the plywood either side of the baseboard joint and I can see that I have space for two copper clad sleepers to be glued to the plywood either side of the join.

Looks good - to me anyway!

Just need to cut more plywood now but that will only be the start with wiring weathering and ballasting still to come! Still lets just proceed with slow ahead at the moment! At least I don't have Klingons on the starboard bow!