(Endpoint Height – Startpoint Height) ÷ Clearance Height = # helix turns Note you need to keep in the same unit of measure for clearance and heights so do a conversion if necessary always remember its 25.4mm to 1 inch. Remember to include the thickness of the helix material, track & roadbed in this calculation.ĭivide the height per turn you want by the difference in height between the start and end points. So next enter your turns, if you don’t know how many turns you need then enter the minimum clearence you need between decks in your choosen scale in this case its 65mm for N Scale to make sure you can get in and re-rail any cars. I haven’t changed the number of turns so its off the scale and unlikely that any loco will pull anything up it. My layout is 225mm between decks so we’ll go ahead and enter 225 into the endpoint height.Īs you can see the software has auto calculated the slope percentage and height per turn.

The next thing to do is enter the end point height, this will be in the same unit of measure as set for the rest of your project so if working in mm enter the value as 349.5(mm) not 13.5(inches) otherwise you’ll get some interesting slope % results. As we are now adding a Helix to our layout we need to remember to think in 3 dimensions.

Imagine its like having one piece of rail on a table and the other on the floor looking down it may appear you can connect them but there is vertical seperation.

If you have set the height of your layout then enter that as the start point height.If you haven’t then set to 0 if you enter a height thats different to the height of the track you are trying to connect to then AnyRail will prevent you connecting those sections of rail. Once you have done that select the Create Helix option in the tool bar. However one of the things people often ask me how to do is draw a Helix so here we’ll cover a few short steps to have you drawing a helix using set-track or Kato Unitrack pieces.įirst select the radius of curve you desire and drop it onto the work area, for this example we are using curved radius 381mm (13.75″) x 30 degree pieces so we will need 12 per circle. Most like AnyRail will even tell you the quantity of materials you need to build your layout and can draw your layout in 3D. Using software to draw your layout is becoming much more common than paper.

Convert track in anyrail 6