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Week 5 (July 3-7)

The wayside power rails for half of the half-scale track have been installed successfully.   Initially, we planned to carve the inner lining of the PVC pipe to make room for the small rectangular copper piece that is used to hold two sections of rail together at each joint.  However, we decided this is too time-consuming and there is an easier way to solve the problem.  Instead of carving the PVC pipe, we simply placed copper piece behind the PVC pipe, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:  Copper rail connector piece placed behind PVC pipe. (Photo by Andrew Lu)

The front of the joint is shown in Figure 2:  The modified collector shoes have been tested to be able to easily glide across the joint.  There is no more overlapping of copper rails and the screws are flush with the surface of the copper rail.

Figure 2:  Two sections of copper rail joined together. (Photo by Andrew Lu)

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