Turnout Template

Railroad Turnout Drawings

These drawings are exact reductions from the prototype. I used information from American Railway Engineering Association (AREA) layout drawings published in the 1926 Railway Engineering and Maintenance Cyclopedia. The lines shown are to the inside edge of the railhead (i.e. gaugeline.)

The drawings are vector-format PDF, so they should print out to the best resolution of your printer. They may be viewed with the freeware Acrobat Reader, obtainable from Adobe for Mac, Windows, Unix and OS/2. Make sure "fit to page" is turned off when you print the files. (Thanks for noting that, Simon!) You can verify the printout size by the length bars in the center of each drawing. All files are smaller than 30kb.

I'd appreciate feedback on how the drawings print out for you, and constructive criticism (what you like, what I could do better, if there is more information you'd like included, etc.) I will be adding the #20 turnout soon.

The tie selection and spacing are approximate on the #9. If anyone has specific spacing and length information, please let me know.

Turnout Links

  • David Honner's Magical Turnout Calculator, an Excel spreadsheet which includes support for 81 scales & gauges, for both conventional and dual gauge turnouts. [Editorial comment: "Incredible!"] It is only presently available on Rick Blanchard's website, about halfway down the linked page.
  • Rick Blanchard's SDSoNS turnout webpage, with a set of N scale templates in GIF form, adjusted for commerical ties, along with comprehensive building instructions.

PT

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This article is ©2000 Randy Gordon-Gilmore. Last updated: 7 Aug 2007.