Points...Turnouts....Switches...

[Mountain]

I was looking at a budget toy trainset that had a point made to a similar design as the old Hornby 0 gauge clockwork points, and I was thinking about how narrow gauge prototypes tended to have a fair amount of unusual point designs, so to start this thread I will give the first example.

Here is a perfect example in prototype form.

https://youtu.be/yxAyUcE4Tok

This design is easy to make if one can solder, as all one needs to do is copy the design kinking the rails at the right position and try to keep the angles shallow where the two tracks join at the V, and solder the point blade onto a long thin bolt that fits through a hole in ones layout. One can then use thin washers to get the blade to sit at the right height. I origionally made one of these points before I learned how to make double bladed points, where I actually used the single bladed point parts (With the exception of the blade itself which I still have) and rebuilt it into a conventional two bladed point which it is to be found on my layout.
These single blade points are quite easy to make, and were common at one time for industrial lightweight narrow gauge lines as horses or people pushing waggons could walk inbetween the rails without any rails being in the way of their feet.
They were also cheap and easy to build, which should also be the case in model form.