The Last Switch
The Rokuhan switches have arrived! These are extraordinary products. Obviously this will allow me to move ahead with trackwork. Indeed, within a few minutes of receiving them I had almost everything assembled and sitting in place.
As an aside, everything fit and aligned perfectly. This is due in large part to the terrific track planning software I use, AnyRail. I must congratulate its developer, David Hoogvorst, for this accomplishment, and also thank him for adding the Rokuhan track library at my request. He reported that Rokuhan was most helpful when he contacted them for some technical details.
However (you knew there had to be a "but" in there somewhere), I still can't permanently lay the lower level track along the front yet. The reason? That little 55mm switch at the bottom left (highlighted in pink, below). It's the key to the puzzle; without it, nothing much else can happen.
The trouble is, that little 55mm switch won't hit the street until the end of 2011 at the earliest. So, what am I going to do? I'm going to make my own, one that looks as much like a real Rokuhan product as possible. This will be accomplished using very similar techniques that I'd used for a T Gauge (3mm, 1:450) switch I made back when there were no 3mm switches at all, and the likelihood of seeing them within a decade was in some question. Rokuhan makes track sections of the same geometry as each leg of the switch, so it will be a matter of grafting these two parts together, and then fabricating the points and frog. I will not bother trying to build the switch machine into the roadbed—in this case, it doesn't need to be, because I can hide it practically anywhere.
One of the ground rules of the project has been and remains building the layout using only commercial track, so that other modelers can do likewise. For me, this means building it as if the switch was available today so that the project can be completed in a timely fashion. Will anyone else ever want to build their own Gorre & Daphetid in Z Scale? I already know someone else who's planning on it, and even if only one person does it, my work is all worth it.