Atlas N Scale Turntable

Turntable and Accessories

A good turntable is hard to find. I have a few HO turntables and none of them are up to scratch. Alternatives that really work are usually quite expensive. The Atlas turntable is a good turntable for a fairly low price.

Dimensions

Atlas Turntable #2790

Top View of the turntable

Side View of the turntable

Bottom View of the turntable

Under the top cover

Inside the bottom plate

Manual mechanism

Drive Unit #2791

Motor Drive with Shed Cover

Turntable with motor drive

Review

The turntable has a very low profile and no part of it juts into the baseboard. This means that no cutout is necessary on the baseboard simplifying the installation. This is especially handy for me as in my layout, there is very little space below the baseboard. The track base is about ??? from the top of the baseboard and with enough ballast the feeding track should align well. The turntable has a geneva mechanism. This makes it easy to align the turntable quickly to the external track. It takes 9 turns of the manual mechanism handle to move the turntable one step. Four of the turns move the turntable and the other five cause no movement. For the same reason, no fine adjustment is possible. If the tracks don't align there is not much that can be done. There is a slight amount of backlash. This may mean that the turntable may have to be rotated in one direction only and the feeding tracks aligned for this situation. The track on the turntable is not tapered at the end so the feeding track may have to be.

Using DCC

reviw of drive unit
possible dcc control
sensor for rev
sensor for home pos
only 4bits available for acc dec
has 24 pos cant fit into single instr
use Extended Accessory Decoder Control Packet - it has 5 bits
{preamble} 0 10AAAAAA 0 0AAA0AA1 0 000XXXXX 0 EEEEEEEE 1
problems - alignment with ext track, backlash, reversing on turning - indiv block?