Rolling Road

[Deleted]

Hi,
Can anyone advise me please where I can obtain plans for a rolling road or even buy one for 7 & 1/4" ?

My Winson Brittania is almost at that stage.

Regards

Jim

[Laurie_B]

Hi Jimmy
Have a look at metalsmith.co.uk/model-railway-products.htm The 'MetalSmith' does modular rolling roads upto 5" gauge.I believe he can make a 7-1/4" gauge rolling road to order.
I bought a 5" gauge version from him earlier in the year.It wasn't as expensive as I thought it might be.It enables me to steam my loco in the back garden!

[spurley]

Hi Jim

I made a rolling road of my own fairly easily and cheaply, I thought anyway! Although my engine is only a 3.5" Tich I'm confident the principle could be used in any gauge. I intend to regauge it later for my 5" model!

I bought some bearings on ebay, 21mm o/d intended for roller skates I think, then two lengths of 25mm angle from B & Q and fastened these onto a piece of board at suitable 'gauge'. I then made some bushes/spacers to suit the bearing inner dimension and, after drilling the vertical web of the angles, fastened them at suitable spacing to suit my engine. Total cost was about £10 and I ave some spare bearings for the next project. You can redrill, within reason, the angle to suit various wheelbases and reposition the gauge to suit whatever engine you are building. I also attached some legs to the base to raise it up to a good level for adjustments etc. Just for fun I used some perspex to make temporary valve chest covers to check valve travel/adjustment while testing under air pressure.

The results can be seen in general chat under Tich. modeleng.proboards20.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1158312665

Cheers

Brian

[standardsteam]

Modelworks still have one listed on their price list, I don't know much more about it than that!

[steamjohn248]

We made up units to form any configuration of rolling road as follows.

Turn grooves in lengths of 50mm round bar to suit your guage and No. of axles, (back to back is most important), turn the ends of the bars down to fit whatever ball bearings you can buy cheap, part off short stubs of tube to fit the OD of the races, weld the stubs of tube to some suitable angle, (at centres to suit the sort of wheel diameter you are going to be testing), weld the angles (flats outward) to some flat bar and you can run any wheel arrangement at whatever wheel spacing simply by either tack weldingng the individual units to a couple of lengths of RHS or screwing them to a timber. Result ,an infinitely variable rolling road. You could even turn two set of grooves in the rollers say for 7 1/4" and 5". So far we have used our units under five different locos.

Steamjohn

[John Lee]

standardsteam said:

Modelworks still have one listed on their price list, I don't know much more about it than that!

Its somewhat expensive at £164.00 for some bits of angle and a few roller bearings.