Hello all. A move to a new house is finally happening in July. And with that a full basement. Plenty of room to build my 12 by 16 layout.

I have plenty of Atlas #6 turnouts and flex track, but I'm thinking I would eventually like to move to ME #6's. Buying 1 or 2 at a time and swapping them out. But I have heard that ME6's are actually close to 5.5, so a direct swap might not work, without having to re-lay connecting track.

So I am wondering if anyone else did the same thing and can tell me how doable it is. What sort of problems did you run into, if any.

 Cleaning track, and cleaning track cleaners...just wanted to share, incase it may assist some one,  I have 2 methods for cleaning my track, the first quick and easy method is the bright boy or any other version I can find, second an old white sock I slip my fingers into saturate it with rubbing alcohol and with 2 fingers one on each rail I give it a pass..

I have a dead serious but absolutely off the wall question: would you pay someone to do part of the hobby that you absolutely hate and don’t care to ever get better at? I’ve hit a huge stumbling block with track laying, I absolutely despise it, which is a monumental problem in our hobby. I’ve survived a bunch of b.s. that none of you want to hear about, you’d think track laying would be small potatoes to me but I can’t/won’t do it.

I've been making some repairs to my 'estate acquired' Diamond Scale turntable, and in doing so I needed to build a whole new turntable pit. I will be covering that shortly, or in another subject thread.

But in the meantime I have realized a mistake I made long ago when I was building my first turntable for my Central Midland layout, so I thought I would start this subject thread out with that bit of knowledge that I think MANY of us first assume when we look at such a project.

Connecting Drive Shaft to Turntable Bridge