Judging by experience and the number of times the subject turns up on the online forums, making stretcher bars (or tiebars as some will incorrectly call them) seems to be one of the more challenging aspects of building pointwork.

Full size, the modern stretcher bar is a piece of fairly substantial flat steel strip, attached to the switch rails by forged brackets. Ambis do a very good representation of this, using etching for the brackets and thin double sided pcb for the bar itself. They work well, and look prototypical, but are fiddly to put together and, when occasionally necessary, not to easy to repair in situ. We used them on our club exhibition layout (East Dean – Hillingdon Railway Modellers) with success, but when considering that layout’s successor, decided against using them again. We had also looked at the C&L stretcher bar, but found them too insubstantial and difficult to adapt for the 31.5mm gauge standards we have been using.

The solution, for which I am grateful to David Yule, is a stretcher bar made up from double sided pcb and phosphor bronze wire. The wire provides the flexibility that is needed to accommodate the angular movement of the switch rails, whilst the pcb pads that go under each of the switch rails provide both the isolation required and a means of preventing the switch tip from rising above the stock rail (full size stretcher bars have extended ends for the same reason). The pads themselves are nominally 1/8 in slices cut crossways from a 7mm scale pcb sleeper.

(In building any turnout, the switch rails should be set so that they just lie closed with nothing connected - anything else and the point motor has to exert more effort either pulling open or forcing closed the offending switch.)