Right off the bat when planning this layout, I knew I wanted a turntable and roundhouse. Consequently, the turntable was the first purchade i made for the layout. It is an old Walthers Cornerstone kit. I dont know when exactly it was produced, but copyright information on the packaging and instructions indicate its at least 30 years old.

The kit is extremely basic, coming with a pit, a bridge that must be assembled, and bushings & copper wipers to provide electricity to the track.

The first thing I did was paint the pit. The original color of the plastic was a sandy tan, and I wanted this turntable to be more like concrete. So, I sprayed it with primer and went at it with various colors of gray. For my first time attempting a weather concrete look, I think it turned out pretty good, though I still plan to go in with weathering powders later on.

I then individually painted each of the cobbles within the pit, to add a bit of color.

The girders of the bridge were painted using Testors enamel “Gunmetal.” The color is nice, but it didnt dry very evenly. I chose to keep it because it actually looks pretty good. I painted the planks on the deck varying levels of brown, and then covered them with increasingly darker brown washes until I was satisfied with how it looks.

Assembling the bridge was extremely easy. The 2 girders are placed on either side of the deck, and 4 little support pieces go across to maintain the correct shape. The kit includes 4 fence pieces and a small arch. I elected not to use these because they look rather silly. I’ll fashion my own later. Also included were 2 discs, one to go above on top of the pit and one underneath. These discs hold the bridge in place.

With the bridge assembled and installed, I turned my attention to the electrical system. The kit included 2 small copper bushings, a wire, and some copper wipers to provide electricity to the track. As per the instructions, I cut the wire in half and soldered one end of the new pieces to the inside of the copper bushings. The instructions then said to slide the bushings into the post, but even before the solder, there would not have been enough space to do this. So, I took an X-Acto knife and scraped the blade along the post until there was enough of a flat spot to fit the solder. I then glued the bushings in place. The wipers were secured in place as shown, and wires were run from a DPDT switch (used to reverse polarity).

With some difficulty, I then soldered the wires to the track and glued it to the bridge. The track used is a section of Atlas Code 80 Flex track cut to length, with the ends filed at an angle to prevent the rails catching.

With all that done, the only thing left to do was to glue the turntable into place. I only used 2 drops of glue for this, so I can remove it if need be.

I plan to motorize the turntable in the future, but for now, it has to be manually spun.

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