It's hard to believe that it is Friday already. Last week I spent the
modeling time I had fixing track problems. The first turnout I built for
this layout was causing the rear truck of my RS-1 to derail nearly each
time. With the visors on and lots of light, it finally dawned on me that
the gauge was too narrow on the point rails toward the frog. Probably
drifted some over time.
Then another turnout had a too-narrow gauge at the points which caused
only one freight car to derail, but it did it consistently, so that was
fixed.
The third turnout issue was more of an annoyance than anything else. My
NW2 and some of my freight cars would visually bump up when going
through the frog. I figured it was some left over solder in the bottom
of the rail right in between the main rail and the guard rail, so I used
a razor saw to try to whittle it down. No such luck. Back with the visor
and lots of light and I just couldn't figure it out. After studying the
problem for about 15 minutes, I found the culprit. I paint my rail by
hand after it is functional. I apparently used too much paint in the
frog area. The paint actually hardened into a blob on the inside of the
guard rail. The razor saw simply by-passed it each time, however, a pair
of curved tweezers is what I needed to remove it. It turned out that the
blob of paint pushed on the inside of the wheels causing the wheel to
then want to ride up on the rail.
This week I did a little bit of "operations", and then got inspired by
Trevor Marshall's scenery work (see his recent blog posts), and started
doing a bit of scenery work. However, although that has been fun, it now
time to get back to work on my scratchbuilt passenger station...
- Peter.
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Peter Vanvliet ([email protected])
Houston, Texas
http://pmrr.org/ (my model railroad - RSS feed <http://pmrr.org/rss.xml>)
http://fourthray.com/ (my company)
http://houstonsgaugers.org/ (model railroad club)
http://nasg.org/
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