Grade Crossing (Curved) for O Gauge Tubular Track V2 by SanDiegoMark

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

NOTE NOTE: the Thingiverse.com Customizer does not handle this file correctly, instead of creating a 6 inch grade crossing, it creates a complete 360 degree circle. You will have to download the OpenSCAD program and run it on your computer. I have emailed the support group at Thingiverse about the problem. ETON ETON
This thing is a wooden grade crossing designed for O gauge tubular track. The design consists of two OpenSCAD programs, one makes a crossing for straight track and the other makes a crossing for O-31, O-42, O-54 and O-72 curved track.
This thing is the curved crossing, for the straight version look here https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2832224
The top of each piece represents wooden boards that are bolted together to make the crossing. Each crossing consists of four pieces. The two center pieces go along side
the center rail and the other two go on the outside of the outer rails. The curved crossing pieces are accurately curved to match the actual track. If you look in the OpenSCAD program, you can see what values I used for the diameters of the four different curves supported. I used the RR-Track program to measure the center rail to center rail diameter of a loop. This seemed to work pretty well as the finished curved crossing pieces can be glued directly to the center rail and to the outer rails.
Each piece of the crossing has a diagonal side to clear the ties and the center rail insulator.
The difficult dimension in this project was the 'space' left on the inside edges of the outer rails for the wheel flanges. I measured a bunch of track and there is about 0.55 inches between the inside edges of the rails. I ended up making the gap about 0.15 inches - which made the crossing pieces 0.4 inches wide. This seems to work on my layout with my mostly MTH rolling stock. You might need to make this dimension smaller to have a larger flange gap.
The grade crossing pieces should fall about 0.07 inches below the tops of the tubular rail.
In the OpenSCAD program, you select the length of the crossing. I found that 4.5 inches works well for rural (1 lane) roads and 6.0 inches works for town (2 lane) roads.
Even with the diagonal side, you should be able to print this thing without using support.
With V2 of the grade crossing, you can optionally print ramps that go up to the crossing. This makes the integration with scenery a little easier in some cases.
You can print either the grade crossing or the ramp. So if you want both, you have to create two stl files.
NOTE: the OpenSCAD preview here on Thingiverse shows the result of the curved grade crossing as a 360 degree circle. Running on my computer using the OpenSCAD IDE shows the curved grade crossing only as long around the circumference as you actually select. You can see that from the screen grab image.