When you have a kid there's a chance you might be building wooden railway layouts at some point. And when you do you can "force" the tracks a little bit in order to make them fit, making use of what they call the "Vario" system.
Now, I like to build layouts with as little vario as possible. After a while the track has a lot of different track pieces, especially the short and long curve combinations skew things. With all these tracks on the ground you're never really quite sure if they make a perfect fit or not. You can of course hold down each track and line up the next one perfectly and work your way along thet track like that but I thought, what if I'd come up with a little tool that would let me add the tracks that I've added to the layout and let the computer tell me whether they make a perfect fit (or near fit) or not. A near fit is what I call a fit that is within 1cm of where the start and end of the track should meet and I consider that fine as well.
The tool is a Java .jar so you need the Java Runtime Engine (JRE) installed on your computer. When you download TrackBuilder it you can start it from the command line with java -jar TrackBuilder.jar
Go add the tracks you've added to your layout at home and see if they make a perfect fit.
Issues:
- The window in which the track is laid out does not scroll so if your layout is big it will fall outside of the window.
- It seems that if you start your track with a straight it does not get drawn. I do not know why.
Download: TrackBuilder