Railway/Curves and 6ft way


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The term six foot way is railway slang for the 6' spacing between adjacent running lines. The usual way to lay out 6' way appears to be the "6' way gauge", which is a simple tool to aid placement of tracks.

At some point I made a simple wooden jig to help with this process. I think it might have been designed to hold the rail ends for cutting with a razor saw, but I can't honestly remember. Purely by accident, this happens to be an extremely useful tool for laying out curves. It's just a block of wood with four grooves cut at the right spacing. Marking the tracks was done by placing a try square on the block, butting a piece of straight setrack up to it, and rubbing gently to mark the rail positions; of course I could have measured it, but I think that was a quicker way of achieving the same result.

Based on the same principle I have also made some platform spacers - short lengths of 2 x 1 PAR with a pair of grooves cut at the right spacing for a platform width. I can't claim that this is the greatest innovation in railway modelling history, but it works very well and is close to foolproof, giving platforms of consistent width without tedious measuring and marking.

Always when building model railways we will be working to much tighter radii than on the prototype. A bogie truck spotted on the Western recently had "minimum shunting radius 22 chains", which in 00 would equate to around 6m radius. We settle, in the end, for something that doesn't look too bad, and part of that impression is looking along the tracks and seeing a smooth line. Actually, I've looked along running lines on real railways and seen them zig-zagging all over the place, but on a model railway that definitely looks bad!

What I have found is that by running my 6' way jig up and down along the rails as I settle and pin them, any kinks are smoothed out, the curve transitions settle themselves, and the end result looks better. It's also easier to pin, as the block holds the track firmly in place during pinning. Finally, running the block over the track a few times after pinning helps to settle the layout and also finds any projecting pins, kinks and other imperfections.