There’s something cathartic about the sound of a UPS Truck idling in front of your home, followed closely by the resounding THUMP of a heavily-loaded parcel landing on your front porch. Especially when you’ve been anticipating its arrival.
After several months of room prep, benchwork construction, backdrop painting, and fascia installation, it’s finally time to install track and turn the large green shelves in our basement into an approximation of The Hills Line. But despite the burning desire to slap it all together just to see something run, I do have a few preparatory steps I need to accomplish to ensure long-term success.
As on the IAIS Grimes Line, I’m using Micro Engineering Code 70 flextrack and turnouts exclusively on The Hills Line. ME remains, in my opinion, the most realistic commercially-available track on the market. But like all mass-produced products, there are some steps you can take to fine tune the track.
The two obvious areas of concern on any commercial turnout are the frog and the points. For the latter, a few swipes from a file adds a knife edge to the rails to prevent car wheels from picking the switch.
For the former, a quick pass over a honing stone makes fast work of the milling down a sometimes too-high frog. Once complete, even finicky cars glide through the turnout.
My long-term plan is to add Frog Juicers for all the active turnouts on The Hills Line, but that’s still several months down the road. I do take the time to prewire the frog for the eventuality.
On ME turnouts, power is fed to the points by the hinge connection to the closure rail. Over time, and following painting, weathering, and ballasting, that connection can fail. Adding a pair of loose feeders ensures that the points stay powered in perpetutity.
Each path out of the turnout get feeders as well. This ensures that every piece of rail is being powered directly from the bus, instead of relying on rail joiners or other internal wiring connections. Is seven feeder wires per turnout overkill? Absolutely not.
The last addition is the brass tube under the throwbar and through the roadbed, which will support the switch lock mechanism. More on that later.
The feeders are run into holes in the foam roadbed and attached to the bus using 3M Scotchlok Connectors.
There’s been a fair amount of discussion lately on several model train forums between the benefits and disadvantages of commercial track components. Opponents point to the lack of consistent manufacturing standards versus the precision of handlaid track. I believe a few simple adjustments make commercial track just as reliable as handlaid with twice the detail. For me, that’s a win-win proposition.
The Hills Line 
My method of turnout installation very closely resembles yours. Is it a lot of work? Indeed it is, but I think it will pay dividends down the road.
-Jack
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Best sound in the world that UPS truck pulling up! I really like ME track and turnouts,It would be nice if they made a#8
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I just started this part of my layout last night. Two questions, you use stranded wire for this part correct? Also, on the red/black feeders, are you soldering them to the sides of the rail or the bottoms? It looks like bottoms in some pics and the sides in some. I learned last night first thing you need to do is line up where you want the holes, doing it after you solder is difficult.
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Feeders are stranded, because that’s what I had on hand. In retrospect solid would have been easier to fish through the foam subroadbed. All connections are made to the bottom of the rail so that the wires are as hidden as possible after installation and ballasting.
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Just a quick follow up in case someone stumbles across these comments later.
Last night I put 4 solid wires on the frog/stock rails at the end of the turnout, and used stranded on the frog and points (you almost have to on those). Anyway wile feeding them through the foam, one wire caught on the foam and broke a frog rail loose from the turnout. It’s somewhat challenging to feed 4 solid wires (as well as 3 others) through foam and roadbed etc. at the same time. I’d just opt to continue using stranded if you want to use this method OR, use stranded on the frog/points, and use solid on the other rails, BUT feed/solder them after the turnout is placed on the foam and feed the solid wire up as if you were doing a regular piece of track.
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