I am contemplating adding a spur to go over to a work station I am also contemplating. My outside loop has 081 turns. I know that Atlas does not make an 081 turn out, and 072 is the largest radius turn out they offer.....(sort of). Is the #5 turn out the same radius as the 081 perhaps? Thanks in advance.
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No! Numbered switches are not considered to have a radius at all. You can barely tell there is even an arc in the #5 switch. I had the same need and used a Ross 080 switch without any problems. Their height is the same and you can even use the Atlas joiners.
Goos luck and Happy railroading,
Don
Not even close. The O-81 is a much sharper 'curve':
-Greg
And here are O-90 and O-99 compared to a #5:
--Greg
Thanks!
Yes you can. But...
I wanted to add a siding to an industry located in a corner of my layout. The outside mainline track diameter were Atlas O81 through O99 depending on the corner. I considered Ross but I wanted to use existing Atlas turnouts. So I spent an evening playing around in RR-Track.
For an O81 curve this is what you can do.
The green track is plain O81. The cyan track has the #5 switch. The add-on straights bring the ends to the same point. You can see how close the two are by the overlay.
The enclosed RR-track file has the results of my experimentation with the #5 and #7.5 and the large diameter curves.
Jan