Having found that the curved turnouts (Marklin 8568) where not functioning, I sought out replacements. New ones go for £60+, so I tried my luck on ebay. Sure enough there is quite a good supply of various Z guage track on ebay, and at around half the price.

These two turnouts came from Germany, they wasn’t in their original boxes, but was still very well packaged in plastic boxes – i was impressed by that, I have received other, albeit not quite so fragile, track just stuck onto a piece of cardboard and put into an envelope! (hence i mention no names..)

I wanted to make a little bit of progress on getting my Z gauge layout to being as perfect running as possible, and not having these turnouts operating would undoubtely lead to frustration later, so was my first thing to address. Its worth noting the position of these turnouts on the layout, its probably the hardest section to put together as its a set of curved radiuses and that ‘mesh’ the inner and outer loops as shown in the schematic below (ignore the errant 8521 in the top right, thats for somethign else 😉

As you can imagine, I dont want to refit these turn outs and find they are faulty, so set about testing them before installing them.

I first ‘cobbled’ the negative/earth feed from the under-table ground with a long yellow wire, this allowed me to change the turn out easily. I then used ‘temporary’ wire fixtures on the remaining turnout control I have available. Initial results where mixed, but all resulted in the turnout being operated which I was happy for.

I then tidied the turnouts away ready for installation at a later point, as it was already quite late after a day of work – still, it was good to make progress and find some of the other issues with the loco you can hear running in the background.

I’ll make note of these and work thru them so I have better running of my train before doing any more additons to the current layout.

Thanks for reading and watching my blog, I hope it provides some use to others 🙂