Joining Unlike Brands of Track

To join differant brands or types of track together there are mainly two basic ways, the first is an adapter track(can get costly), the second is adapter pins. To join Gargraves track to tubular 031 style track GG makes O gauge adapter pins to GG track, also have 027 style track pins to GG. Have heard that there is Atlas to GG track adapter pins, don't know for sure on this.

Atlas makes adapter pins to go from Atlas track to regular tubular track.

To the best of my knowledge, you can not join Fastrac and Realtrax together unless you use adapter tracks that go to regular tubular track then use another adapter piece to go to the other brand of track.

Personally I like tubular track, 031, 042 and Gargraves track.

Lee F.

One of my pet gripes....Marx track was compatible with Lionel 0-27 for decades, and

Marx even made dummy knuckles to mate Marx cars to Lionel, until providing plastic

knuckles on their last and cheapest series.  And now everything is proprietary and

nothing matches in trackwork, easy became machine shop, and there is no NMRA-

style standardization.

I made a custom crossing (67-degree angle) from a solid hunk of plastic by cutting flangeways on a radial arm saw, see photo. The regular track just butts up to it. This has been working reliably for many years.

You might be asking for trouble to build a crossing with a curve through it, although I have done that in HO scale with sectional track. I cut the ties out of one section of track to fit over the other piece, then cut gaps in the rails of the first piece of track so they snuggled together, then soldered the rails together and cut all the flangeways and made guard rails. Maybe easier to do in O gauge since the running rails don't have to be insulated from each other, and the center rail roller can just travel across a flat insulated surface built up to rail height, as in photo below.

Another possibility, which has sometimes been done in the real world, is to have the secondary tracks cross the main line on a low "drawbridge". I've seen photos of a 2-foot gauge sugar cane railway crossing a 42" gauge mainline with a "drawbridge" arrangement in Queensland.

Here are photos of a "drawbridge crossing" on actual railroads in Queensland Australia. It might be an interesting possibility for your situation, especially to cross a curved track of a different type.

http://www.sa-transport.co.za/...ail/drawbridges.html

Slightly off the topic, but I continue to be surprised that after ~75 years, there's no good/easy way to join O27 and O31 tubular.  Seems like an easy solution that didn't involve ramming in pins would have come decades ago.  Aside from the height issue (not a big deal) it seems like tons of O27-to-O31 pins would be out there.  Is there such a thing floating around, and I've just never seen them?

Since ramming the O31 pins in and reforming the track works fine, I don't think there's been a huge incentive to join the two types.  FWIW, you might be able to adapt the Gargraves pins to do the trick, I've never tried.

Ace,

Thanks for sharing your handiwork. I am thinking of fabricating hand laid crossing and adapting it to the Super Streets and Real Trax.