Jig - Drilling for rail track

This is mainly for beginners who may be faced with a repetitive job and how a simple drill jig can help.

Faced with drilling a few hundred 6 mm holes in some 30 x 6mm steel rail, I made a simple drilling jig. The object was to have a jig mounted on the Mill/Drill and not move the jig, just the rail section. Each end of the rail needed two 6mm holes so that sections could be "fish plated" together. In addition, the same jig would be used to make the fish plates and also used to put holes into the sleeper ends.

Back to the rails.

The first photo shows a rail section in the jig waiting to be drilled. It is pushed up against a removable dowel pin on the right.

The next shot shows the measurements of where the holes are required

This one shows the first hole being drilled 38mm from the end of the rail. The rail is hard up against the dowel pin.

The last shot shows the rail moved to the left and a second dowel pin located into the first drilled hole (38mm from the end of the rail) ready for the second hole to be drilled 30 mm from the first hole.

All that is left is to turn the rail about (remembering that the holes are offset to the bottom edge of the rail !!).

Now off to weld the sleepers to the rail using another jig to space the sleepers in their correct position and space the rails the correct distance apart. A simple jig made of wood which is sacrificial and may get a few weld burns !

Good example of production work!

Be aware that although our lines are not Network Rail distances, they can still be affected by expansion and contraction if quite long and built up too tightly.

We found this in my club, which uses 25 X 10mm steel bar rail, with some in plastic moulded chairs screwed to the sleepers, some with welded lugs with a screw-hole each side of the rail.

There are a few steel cross-ties welded on but not on every sleeper, mainly some with a hole for a stake to give some lateral stiffness to the whole formation on curves where a combination of expansion strains and the behaviour of the clay ground gave us problems.

One part in particular became quite sinuous, and was cured by using L-section fishplates with a narrow flange to support the bar, oversized holes (6.5mm I think, for M6 fasteners) and of course expansion-gaps.

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(In full size the fish-plate is profiled to the rail web, and has elongated holes. I believe it is also greased on the mating surface.)

Well done, I'm a big fan of jigs, metalwork and woodwork.

Bear...........

Sorry, me being a bit thick tonight.

I presume that the distance marked as 38mm on the jig is not the distance between centres of the two holes (which it is for the 30mm dimension), but is actually 38mm plus half the diameter of the dowel pin between centres.

If not then the first hole is going to be 38mm minus half the diameter of the pin and that would not correspond to the drawing?

Or am I missing something!