0
Oldebrick Junction
This is my contribution to the contest for the third category.
What is going on there?!
Oldebrick Junction is a medium size railroad emplacement from around 1950. As Holland is recovering from WW2 and trying to rebuild damaged railroad infrastructures and old allied army trains are being transferred to the public railroad companies, Oldebrick is enriched with a new segment turntable that is large enough to turn trains of the Emerald type (shipped just after D-Day and recently repainted and made suitable for the Dutch Railroad company NS).
As you can see, the bridge of the turntable is already placed and the railworkers are now trying to finish it off. Since the contest requires just one picture, not all the details of this scene are too clear, but one of the NS employees was kind enough to upload some pictures of this historic event to brickshelf, so that we are able to elaborate more on this.
First of all, mr. Goudriaan, before and after WW2 president director of the Dutch Railroad company (see wikipedia [note: in Dutch]), seen inspecting the new turntable. Two workers are installing the turntable signalaccording to Dutch railroad specifications even as we speak. The signal shows a yellow circle when the turntable is moving (or at least not locked) or an arrow pointing to the right when the turntable is locked in place and it is safe to drive a train onto the bridge (custom vinyl stickers). As you can see it takes a lot of workers to get such a large structure done in time. Also casualties now and then happen (a worker tripped over the hose of the burner and fell down on his nose). To make life a little easier for the turntable operator in a quite often rainy country like Holland, NS also decided to fit the bridge with an operator shed. The shed is at this moment just about to be lifted up by a modern (in those days standards) crane truck. The insets show the gearing of the bridge. It is equipped with a small PF motor. Large advantage of a segment turntable is that it is easy to connect it to the 'mainland' without the need for special tricks. The 'kings chair' is positioned to the far end and the other end has some wheels to help it turn smooth.
About the project
I have never before seen a segment turntable in LEGO, although there are some existing railroad model ones. In the large train world, those turntables are also rare. For LEGO purposes they are convenient however: they don't take up too much space and allow e.g. simple access to sanding tower, water tower and recoaling installation, but also to the engine shed without a lot of space devouring 9V points. You don't need to make a lot of difficult elektronics to switch the polarity of the track, or make an ingenious system to power the track at the turntable bridge.
Hope you have enjoyed this project. I hope to fit it with an atmega8 processor and custorm circuit board in near future to make it automatically controlable by e.g. the PF remote and/or an NXT. As this moment the bridge is fully functioning using the PF switch, although the 9V tracks are not yet connected.
