It has been a busy day. I now have a name for my new layout. It will be called Valdieu-Lutran. Valdieu-Lutran is a small town in France near the German and Swiss borders and sits on the Canal du Rhone du Rhin, so allowing me a small quayside and, if it is a heritage railway, the ability to run Austrian/German, Swiss and French rolling stock.

The layout is built on boards by Tim Horn and they boards are discribed in my article HERE and the connection system using pattern makers’ dowels HERE.

I have wanted to try embedded track for some time and on my new layout a track has to cross a car park/station entrance to get to the goods yard at the rear of the front boards.

The track is being embedded by using 2mm copper clad paxolin sheets, normally used for printed circuit boards, layed on 2mm cork to a raise it to the height of the existing Peco mainline 009 track.

The boards were screwed to the baseboards using No. 2 x 3/8″ brass screws embedded in the paxolin sheets using a countersink cutter, the coutersunk hole being wider than the screw head to prevent shorting when the copper on the centereline of the track was gapped using a cutting wheel in my Dremel unit.

The track is laid using guidelines produced by Peco 18” radius track guides and soldered to the copper clad board on the outside of the rail at about 1” spacing.

The 2nd rail and checkrails were spaced using DCC  Concepts N gauge track gauges and soldered as before.

Once the second checkrail had been installed then the track and paxolin base were seperated at the baseboard joint and the centre of the track between the checkrails filled with DAS clay and embossed with cobbles.

To make the cobbles I used a piece of 1/8″ square brass tube for Eileen’s Emporium to impress the wet DAS clay.

Once the clay has dried a single layer of ‘cobbles’ will be added outside of the running rails. The cobbles will then be painted and weathered.