All --
OK, I'll bite. I was a hand-laying fanatic. Still would be, except I drove
the golden spike a couple of months ago. Except for background tracks and
hidden tracks, all my trackwork (including all turnouts and crossings) is
handlaid. (My layout is 12' x 43', double-tracked, with about seventy
turnouts, five crossings, and one double slip switch. It took me about ten
years of spare time between honey-dos to get from zero benchwork to 100 percent
trackage completion.) However, I also have extensive experience laying today's
flextrack and ready-to-install turnouts (Shinohara, Tomalco), thanks to Roger
Nulton's Monon. If you are a member of the NASG, you get the Dispatch every
two months and you have seen my review of the various track and turnout
products. And if you ever subscribed to the "1:64 Modeling Guide," you saw my
articles on building crossings and turnouts.
So I can tell you this -- If you lay your own track you are not constrained by
the geometries of ready-made turnouts and crossings. You can make curved
turnouts to any radii and crossings of any angle. Curved turnouts are no more
difficult to build than straight ones. Crossings are easier to build than
turnouts. Neither one -- once you get the hang of it -- should take you more
than an hour, not including painting, staining, ballasting, and throw mechanism.
And let me tell you this -- Laying ready-to-install turnouts is not a simple as
it's cracked up to be. Tomalco's turnouts always need to be checked for gauge
because they are glued together. I have heated and regauged rails on most of
these, and spiked the rails afterward to prevent shifting. But the real
time-consumer with flex turnouts is laying out smoothly-flowing trackwork.
There's a lot of trial and error. This is compounded by the fact that a
Shinohara #6 is substantially shorter than a (correct) Tomalco #6, so using
anything but the real thing as a template won't necessarily work.
Making the Shinohara turnout DCC-compatible (grounding the closure rails to the
stock rails and isolating the frog) is not a trivial task. The throwbar must
be replaced. At least with Tomalco, you can ask owner Larry Morton to furnish
you with DCC-compatible versions.
I have to tell you that I was immeasurably helped because of my ownership of a
Kadee spiker. These modified staplers were quite pricey at the time they were
offered -- in the 1970s, I believe. Kadee still sells parts and spikes
(staples) for them, but no longer markets a complete unit. Apparently the Feds
got after them because the device cuts and ejects, at a rather high velocity, a
short horizontal portion of each staple as it drives the two outer spike-shaped
staple remnants into the tie. This is a potential hazard for, say, onlookers'
eyeballs.
I would encourage any of you who are interested in hand-laying to purchase one
of these spikers on eBay, if it weren't for the fact that mine began to come
apart on my last trip to lay track on Roger's layout. The main body of the
tool (not available as a separate part) had a chunk come out of it because of
crystallization of the metal. This is probably because of a combination of
metal fatigue over the years plus impurities in the metal alloy. Therefore, I
suspect that many of these Kadee spikers, because they are of the same vintage,
are beginning to, or are about to, crumble. Too bad. If you run across one
and really want it, ask the owner how large his layout(s) was/were. Ultimate
failure due to metal fatigue depends on the number of stress cycles (one cycle
per pair of spikes driven) to which the device has been subjected. Mine was
also used on my previous layout, which had twice as much track, hand-laid, as
the current one. Most layouts
are quite a bit smaller, so fatigue may not yet have taken its toll.
Dick Karnes
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