Wooden train tracks

I suppose the female end of the track could be done with a drill press and a saw, the “rails” could be done with a straight bit (I have an idea for a thing to cut the curved track rails using a straight bit.) The male end of the track would be the trickiest or perhaps the most tedious to do.

You could do something different for connecting the track pieces together but if it needs to connect to commercially available track you’d want to match it.

-- Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

I’ve looked at those bits also. At $140 a set I think I will experiment with other solutions first. I had thought of using rare earth magnets but DaveR’s observation that one would still need to match the commercial stuff has stumped me (the matching not DaveR’s comment). The ball and stem approach looks pretty clumsy in my view so I’m still working on a solution.

-- ....next big purchase is wood for the next project, Mark

I’ve seen some wooden track pieces that use a small ball on a dowel as the male end. Still, it seems like a tedious thing to do that. When my brother and I were very young, he was given a wooden train set. He still has it. The track has square connectors—sort of a tenon in a mortise open top and bottom. To hold the track together, there are little rubber inserts in the sides of the tenon and notches in the sides of the mortise.

It would be nice to be able to use commercially available track if you don’t want to make some of the parts such as turnouts.

I was just thinking that the idea I have for cutting the “rails” in the curve pieces would work for the straight ones and you could make any curve radius you’d like which would allow you to make parallel runs.
There’s a lot of waste cutting the curves the way they show it in the downloadable plans on the Rockler site.

-- Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

I looked into this a while back and determined I could buy ready-made track on the Internet as cheap if not cheaper than I could buy the wood and make it.

-- Always remember half of the people in this country are below average.

Why can’t you use a dovetail to connect the tracks?

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

the dovetails wouldn’t fit to the commercial tracks, but it would look great, and very original.

-- Roper - master of sawdust-

Guess I’m thinking if you’re going to spend $100+ for track bits, you probably aren’t thinking about using commercial tracks.

Then again it’s alot easier and cheaper to make a couple of home-made to commercial adapters.

-- arborial reconfiguration specialist

For the cost of the bits you can buy a lot of track at IKEA.

I would trry dowels as oposed to dovetails since they are easier to make and use.Yes once again a good idea too expensive to make a one of for your grand kids they would need to be used much more than this why cant we do a service whereby we could rent the cutters for a week at a time any real damage could be covered with insurance seems you could do this with items such as these .Alistair

-- excuse my typing as I have a form of parkinsons disease