DalaGStanator's Customs, Mods and Experiments

While I was transferring all my TOMY and TrackMaster track and road parts to better boxes, it occurred to me that I've only had 'two' stop/go pieces for each system all along. This gave me an urge to reverse engineer one of the TOMY ones and replicate it in cardboard. I also recall having two Keenway train sets with "plastic wooden" track, and one of the accessories from them is a station where they (clearly) reverse engineered the Plarail stop/go mechanism. All it consists of is a shaft connected to the switch with a tab near the middle that pushes up a loose bar (which falls back down when set to "go").

So, I just took out one of the TOMY stop/gos and traced it onto cardboard, with the side protrusion also being measured from the original. The shaft is a toothpick with cardboard for the switch and tab, and works exactly the same way. My only real issue right now is the inaccurate geometry, because Plarail track is (usually) made of two layers "sandwiched" together. I might have a better chance to achieve that with matchsticks or the like for the outer rails on both halves. Either way, it worked fairly nicely for a cardboard reproduction. It could also work well for destinations built like official ones with embedded track.