Memorial Day weekend is a busy time at the Pennsylvania Live Steamers
with more locos and drivers that the club track can accommodate without a
long sign-up sheet. To alleviate the problem, Mike Moore offered to use the
occasion for the "first run" of his new track purchased from the chap in
Florida who advertises portable track frames. Several of us were on hand
for the Wednesday "work day" to assemble the track. Mike has used 1/2 inch
marine plywood with three coats of epoxy all over it and on the top of each
sheet a coat of green paint. He has affixed flanges at the corners on the
bottoms of the 8 foot sections into which pieces of pipe adjustable in
length can be screwed. The straight sections are 8 feet long and wide enough
for six tracks with a distance of 5 inches outside rail to outside rail.
Tunrouts are number 8 on the main for crossovers and number 6 in the yards,
one yard on each long side. There are, I recall, four 8 foot sections on
each side of the oval. The diameter is 20 feet inside diameter, and there
are only two tracks on the curved sections. After assembling the track and
leveling it, it was clear that the 8 foot sections sagged in the middle.
The conclusion of several experienced builders was that the frame from
Florida could not support the weight of the marine plywood with legs only at
the corners of each section. Extra legs were used to try to prop up the
centers of the 8 foot sections. However, it seemed that when we tried to
prop up the center the two ends also went up a little and then the entire
piece seemed to "hold" the sag, but perhaps not as much. The curved
sections with only two tracks posed no sagging problems perhaps because they
had only one leg in the middle of each curved section, but the sagging was
noticeable on the 8 foot sections after the whole track was leveled at all
of the joints. The square channel used for the frame on the 8 foot sections
had four going lengthwise evenly spaced--that is one on each outside edge
and then two more, one each a third of the way in from the edge, and then
there were, I think, two cross pieces, again a third of the way in from each
edge.
Another PLS member has one of the frames made by the same fellow in
Florida, but he has only two circuits, or two tracks, all the way around,
and he did not report the same sagging problem, and he was on hand when we
assembled Mike's track. These are the frames that were reviewed by Ron
Brown in SitG a while back when he built one in his yard in New York. As I
recall, Ron's kidney-shaped course was only two tracks wide.
Because I want more than two tracks on the elevated track that I would
like to build in our yard this summer, I believe that I am going with the
design by Harry and Paul Quirk for their portable track--parallel metal
studs with pieces of cedar on top at right angles to the length of the metal
studs.
And now it's time to load my gear into the car and get down to the PLS
property to enjoy the Memorial Day steam-up.
Bob Blackson
Pa Live Steamers
