Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'...

Last night I sat at the new workbench and actually wondered what to do!  It's almost as if I'm out of practice...

Thinking back a couple of days, my Dad had shown me his Boxing Day project of building a home for his Modelex rolling road, comprising of a small baseboard, a short running line and his rolling road firmly fixed down.  I had been impressed with his rolling road when he first purchased it and had researched something similar for myself, however being a multi-gauge modeller it would be expensive to buy one in 16.5mm gauge and 9mm gauge.

Enter DCC Concepts, who have devised a nifty re-gaugeable set of rollers that sit on conventional track and can be gauged for 9mm, 12mm, 16.5mm and 18.2/18.83mm gauge track by use of different inserts.  This allows folk like myself to benefit from one set of rollers to suit several projects.  I purchased a set online earlier this year and although I have been able to test them, I hadn't put any thought into how they could be set up longer term.

The Rolling Road being tested by my industrial diesel on the 9mm gauge track.

The set-up above was created by recycling parts of the balsa framed/foam core topped baseboard from the 'Misterton Fen Tramway', hacked about to create a board 14" by 6".  Track takes the form of a length of Roco HOe track given to me a couple of years ago by Jordan Leeds and a length of Peco code 75 that was fished out of a bin last year, left by someone who couldn't see it's usefulness once it was kinked!

Electrical set up, plug in, one switch, simples!

The electrical connections are also salvaged from the MFT, let into the baseboard frame at a point where some damage had occurred to the balsa wood frame.  A slide switch allows the user to switch between the 16.5mm and 9mm gauge tracks.

So far I have only found one problem... the bogie mouldings on some American Bo-Bo diesels don't clear the rollers properly.  It's a good job you can run things up and down the tracks as well!