Trouble with road pieces

Hi! It's me again. The last year I bought a Thomas at The Timber Yard set (Thomas and Terence Deluxe Set) at FaceBook Marketplace for 30USD (complete set). When I started to assembling the road pieces the clips that connect each piece to other they broke up in an attempt to remove the road. How I can fix it? I'm going to be grateful to any answer. 
 

[Super]

I am not sure I have seen anyone make a repair like this to a road piece but I am sure someone out there has but regular road pieces are so inexpensive I would assume that the broken ones are just thrown away and easily replaced. However your piece is different as it is an exclusive piece for this set only I believe so its a bit harder to replace but...I have bought these pieces myself on Ebay so you may have some luck in searching the road pieces for sale there. Has that piece been weathered as what I remember them as a deep color brown.

Unfortunately, all of those brown road pieces from that set (as well as the Elizabeth station crossing set that reuses the same molds but in normal road grey) are made out of a different more brittle plastic than regular straight and curved road and are very, very prone to cracking now that they are somewhere north of 15 years old (it may be a similar plastic mix to the blue road switches, which are also more brittle than normal road and turn green with heat and sun exposure) Any you find intact are probably already living on borrowed time.

As for replacing them... hmm, any reliable way to lock into the notch in the connecting protrusion that usually gets locked by the clip is probably a good place to start. A more robust insert that replaces the clip and is braced against the outer wall surrounding the cutout for the clip may hold up better. I'll dig out a copy of that set and see if I can design a 3D printed insert, I'd be interested in them for my own sets

[Super]

Many thanks Duckster...a 3D printed repair....brilliant! 👍

I went through a few basic iterations and ended up with these. They fit right into the molding of the original road pieces and hold on about as well as the originals, even when I used one on both halves of the joint.



I printed the "final" versions at the highest quality setting in Creality Slicer 3.8 and they took about 10 minutes on my Ender 3 Pro. They are a loose press fit in the molding so you might want to glue them in place. If the clip is too tight just file the bump down slightly after printing.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1...SBIOEuspHt

I don't remember off the top of my head if the Timberyard road pieces have exactly the same molding features underneath, I haven't gotten a copy of the set out of storage yet. It may end up cracking the protruding part of the opposite connector, that road is brittle enough that I've seen that big oddly shaped piece broken off.

[Super]

Wow...great work and design Duck. Thanks for doing this and sharing with us 😃