Movable track bumpers

June came and went with only one post to this blog.  Part of the month Nona and I drove to the Dallas, Texas area to pick up a travel trailer that we had purchased.

Over this 4th of July weekend I have been making final preparations to take these modules for their first exhibition in Sacramento as part of the AsiaNrail layout. On Friday, I took the modules over the Paul Ingrahams place as he had most of the rest of the layout set up in his garage and we wanted to work out any bugs with getting the Musashi-Koyama modules into the layout ahead of time.  I am happy to say that any problems were small and have already been solved.

The modules can be used in a number of different ways and for this layout this is going to be an end of line terminal station.  The last thing one wants to the have a train overshoot the end of the line and fall several hundred scale feet to the floor !  So I needed to come up with some track bumpers.

What I came up with was to shape scrapes of 1/2 inch plywood and painting them a concrete color.  Then I drilled a pair of 1/8 inch holes and inserted 1/8 inch styrene tubes with Walthers Goo to secure secure them.
From the same pattern used to drill the holes in the bumpers, Holes are drilled on the center line of the roadbeds at each end of the module.  When this end of the module connects to another part of the AsiaNrail layout, the holes will be covered by connecting tracks.

Styrene strip was painted black, and then attached to the flat side of the bumpers.  Then some safety striping was cut from a sticker set and applied to the styrene.  These can now be moved to wherever they are needed depending on the use of the modules in a layout.