John P
Active Member
It seems obvious to me that if flangeways are deeper than flanges, there will never be a problem. Use bottomless chasms, if you want. The RP-25 standard is designed to give you smooth movement through turnouts, but every part has to match. Change the wheel width, and you'll get better-looking wheels, but the price is likely to be a "dip" as the wheel passes over a frog. I've done a lot of hand-laid turnout construction, and our club uses some "semi-scale" wheels with the narrower tread width. I test every turnout with a car that has the narrower wheels, and I can make it run almost flawlessly, but it requires a little cheating: keep the flangeway adjacent to the frog to the bare minimum, and make it up on the opposite (guardrail to stock rail) side. What that does is to keep the most sensitive area, at the tip of the crossing vee, to the minimum width. There's no way to prevent that gap from having the width of two flangeways side by side, so it's best to keep them as small as possible. And geometrically, that keeps the area as short as possible too.
Of course, with a commercial turnout you'll have to live with the manufacturer's choice of dimensions. One thing you can do, if the flangeways are too wide, is to narrow them (not fill up the depth!) with a plastic shim. That should have the effect of keeping the passing wheels on the optimum path.
Of course, with a commercial turnout you'll have to live with the manufacturer's choice of dimensions. One thing you can do, if the flangeways are too wide, is to narrow them (not fill up the depth!) with a plastic shim. That should have the effect of keeping the passing wheels on the optimum path.