Tutorial 4. Adding Pointwork
A simple oval of track soon gets a bit boring. Lets add a passing loop, so that we can run two trains.
Open your layout from Beginners Guide Part3. Wait until the train is not on the North side of the oval, and press <F9> to enter pause mode (we don’t want trains running through our engineering work!)
To build a loop, we will need a couple of extra nodes in the straight track on the North side of the oval. Right-click on the track a little way from one end of the straight section, and select Insert Node from the popup menu.
Do the same near the other end of the straight. You will see that our straight has been split into three connected links.
Now select tracklaying mode by clicking on the track icon 
on the button bar.
Now build the first switch: drag with the mouse from one of the outer nodes to the tick above the inner node.
These extra ticks are “snapping points” used for laying parallel tracks. The spacing is set in the track options dialogue.
Do the same thing on the other side:
Complete the loop by joining the open nodes.
Notice how the loop track is exactly parallel to the existing track, and the switches form nice smooth curves. Follow the train around the oval a few times to have a look at your work from different angles (you can turn off track aids with <F6> to get a “clean” view).
Notice how the train always goes the same way through the switches. We can change this.
Changing the train route
Go back to the top-down view (press <5>) and double-click on the node with the facing switch. The switch dialog should open:
Here the red arrow shows the default direction through the switch. If you click the “Change Default” button the default arrow route switches to the other option
You can tell trains with certain route names to take a different path through the point by putting the route names into the appropriate boxes.
Put a star (“*”) in the box labelled Alternate. This means that trains arriving at the switch will alternately take one route or the other (* is a wildcard standing for any route name).
Press ok to close the dialog and watch what happens to the train.
You can download the layout from this tutorial here: tutorial4.zip (194kB)
loneaussie 19/02/2015 05:52:19