Dislocated guardrails?

One of the first things people are tempted to do is claim that the guardrails are not positioned properly. Well, believe it or not, lots of real turnouts are configured this way. What is truly incorrect about this turnout is the excessive length of the frog wing rails and guardrails; back when I made it (1991), I erroneously believed they needed to be longer than their 1:1 counterparts in order to work reliably in 1:160.

In this closeup you can clearly see that the frog point was made by staggering the rail ends, rather than tapering them both to run parallel all the way to the tip; this resulted in considerably less filing to do. The hardware that secures the frog and guardrails in place is simulated with bits of copper wire inserted into holes drilled in the ties.

Image specs: These images were captured with a Canon 20D digital SLR.

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