Gremlins?


F

f1_indy2000

Guest
I will be having a great session on running my trains. They will run for about 45 minutes to an hour then all of the sudden the model railroad gremlin will strike and cause the exact same car in the exact same place to derail. After I turn the car around and it still jumps I just take it off and put a different car in its place and the trains run smoothly for a little while and then BAM he strikes again either further up or down the train. Its the wierdest thing and wonder if any of you out there might have this happen to you. I find it to be a little funny but a little frustrating, therefore I have gremlins on my layout :D
 
Same spot?
I know at the club we'll run for hours with no problems then for no reason get derailments at various locations.
Gremlins... never did like those AMC's!
 
It's track crud. I've got one of those small Dirt Devil vacs and go over the whole layout before I operate. Since I don't have an empire, this take less that 10 minutes. I'm always amazed at what shows up. Every time, there will be at least one piece of ground foam that has migrated into flangeway, some bits of ballast that managed to move up in the web of the rail to catch a flange, and assorted dirt and junk that falls on a layout in a basement. Spiders are a big one for me. They love to build webs across the tracks way in the back, where I can't see them. If I don't vacuum, the webs will get wrapped around the axle of some piece of rolling stock and the dang thing will start derailing as enough builds up to finally affect the flange.

A good vacuuming has saved me more of those mystery deraiments than anything else I've ever done.
 
f1_indy2000 said:
I will be having a great session on running my trains. They will run for about 45 minutes to an hour then all of the sudden the model railroad gremlin will strike and cause the exact same car in the exact same place to derail. After I turn the car around and it still jumps I just take it off and put a different car in its place and the trains run smoothly for a little while and then BAM he strikes again either further up or down the train. Its the wierdest thing and wonder if any of you out there might have this happen to you. I find it to be a little funny but a little frustrating, therefore I have gremlins on my layout :D
Click to expand...

Only when guests are over and want to see trains run.....:rolleyes: :mad:
 
Gremlins on the railroad is what keeps things interesting. Just when you think you've seen it all, some new head scratcher pops up. I regard them as learning experiences and with my railroad, I'm well on my way to become a learned man. Ha.

Jim
 
Gremlins just happen sometimes. My layout is 24x24 and I get plenty. Sometimes never figure out the problem and it doesnt repeat.

I have an employee that brings his wife over and she hasnt seen a train run yet. Things go smooth and when she walks in the door I cant get an engine to run to save my life.

I just recently converted 100 cars to kadee couplers and proto trucks and scale weighted them all. Each car was tested for 10 laps and then mixed up and tested another 10 laps until they all ran smooth. 14 steam engines cleaned and lubed and covered. Dad comes over and we spent 2 hrs and couldnt get a 10 car train to make a lap.

However we had a picnic over the summer and had 48 people thru the train room in 7 hrs. I had 3 trains running laps and 3 trains switching with 3 operators and never had a derailment.

Sometimes it works like a charm and sometimes it is a nightmare. The nightmare days I just build mountains and plant trees. Do something else for awhile.

Good luck and remember to have fun.
 
excellent replies and thanks. I was beginning to think I was targetted or something, or because my layout is 13X8 L shape and the 13 is what they are after :D . I'm not superstious or anything like that. My dad has a layout that 15X20 and simular occurrance happen on his layout. He has the itty bitty spiders issue on his layout since its twelve years old versus mine is still being built. But we have ran trains and everything runs dandy until all of a sudden somebody doesn't want to play anymore. On my layout derailments have seem to happen everywhere when this occurs. I didn't think of guk on the track or on the car's wheels. All my cars are JB wheels and figure they would be pretty clean. One time I had an audiance come and see my layout and sure enough the gremlin struck ruining the show and I basically said show is over. Yah I kind of learn and this little thread has been helpful too. Usually when it happens I just do another project or just think about whats up next. Thanks again.
 
I was honestly curious if it was just me. I can spend a lot of time tweeking up a turnout. It will gauge perfectly, good profile on the moving rail, modest frog depth, solid motion of the switch machine, gradient is smooth, rails lay flat, etc. Certain pieces still derail every 10 times through.

Handlaid vs. commercial, good switch machines vs. cheap, slow-mo vs. solenoid: same results.

So I guess I just put a speed restriction on the turnout for six-axil locomotives and put it in the "stuff happens" category.
 
Metal axles

I still say as I did before in another thread it's wheel wobble. Unless you have both metal wheels and axles you'll have some problems with wheel wobble. That means if you have a metal wheel and a plastic axle that is slightly bent then at some point in it's rotation it will pinch in. If it pinches in at the time it's going over a switch or some not some perfect track it will jump up and derail. I changed 95 percent of my wheel sets to metals axles. I'm now 99.9 percent derailment free. I bought the box of 100 to save on cost. That's the only thing it could be. Try a car that you know has both metal wheels and axles. Bachman Silver Series have both. Run the car and see if it ever derails at any of these gremlin places. If it doesn't you found the problem. I'm not totally sure about this. I just did the trail and error thing on my layout and found that Bachman freight cars almost never derailed.

NYC_George
 
Perhaps

It might be wheel wobble (and I'll check it, thanks for the hint), but checking the wheelsets is part of my inspection when I first commission anything, and I also do it at annual inspection. And... I've had trouble with replacement wheelsets too. I think that it's just the incompatibility of six-axil locomotives with #6 turnouts.

The other trouble spot is probably moving rail end profile, though it might be 'cause a curve goes right into a turnout without easing, at the top of a hill. That one tends to split the switch with Amfleet cars.
 
I fired up the layout last night and just started running trains in circles - to give them some running time if nothing else.

A couple of cars got removed from the layout for persistent derailing, but that wasn't the weird thing.

The weird thing is there are a couple of spots on the layout - one where the locomotive is taking the straight path through multiple switches, the other when going around what appears to be a perfectly normal, if possibly a bit tight, curve, where everything comes to a halt, the booster reads a fault, and then a couple of seconds later, everything starts back up again as if nothing had happened.

But it doesn't happen every time. Or to every locomotive, although it does seem to get most of them... although dual engine consists behave exactly the same as a single locomotive. For awhile last night everything was doing laps without issues (after having done the move, pause, move thing for a couple or three laps) and then suddenly... boom. Sound goes out, everything stops.... and then the sound comes back and it starts moving again.

Very weird.
 
JeffShultz said:
I fired up the layout last night and just started running trains in circles - to give them some running time if nothing else.

A couple of cars got removed from the layout for persistent derailing, but that wasn't the weird thing.

The weird thing is there are a couple of spots on the layout - one where the locomotive is taking the straight path through multiple switches, the other when going around what appears to be a perfectly normal, if possibly a bit tight, curve, where everything comes to a halt, the booster reads a fault, and then a couple of seconds later, everything starts back up again as if nothing had happened.

But it doesn't happen every time. Or to every locomotive, although it does seem to get most of them... although dual engine consists behave exactly the same as a single locomotive. For awhile last night everything was doing laps without issues (after having done the move, pause, move thing for a couple or three laps) and then suddenly... boom. Sound goes out, everything stops.... and then the sound comes back and it starts moving again.

Very weird.
Click to expand...

I can just about invision what you went through. My layout is direct current and everything ran extremely well on Saturday night and then nothing in one key section. I have a complete section of track thats about 18 feet long and just dead. I looked at all the contacts, check my soldering and everything appears to be ok, but something made me think there was something laughing me, Darn Gremlins! I'm sure I will solve the problem, but its just funny how weird things happen when you go to a lot of trouble make sure things like these don't happen.
 
Your not depending on switch points to power this section? If you are some times the points are just enough off the cut the power. I would make sure ever section of the railroad gets a power lead attached and any track that uses that lead for power gets soldered.
 
NYC_George said:
Your not depending on switch points to power this section? If you are some times the points are just enough off the cut the power. I would make sure ever section of the railroad gets a power lead attached and any track that uses that lead for power gets soldered.
Click to expand...

Well I fixed it last night. The wires needed to be resoldered. All I could think is I'm not very good at soldering, therefore I made that correction.
George, basically what I have going on is the section of track is wired and goes to an Atlas selector, where I have all the other wires that are sections leading to. When I want to use that section I put it in the up position and when i don't I put in the middle. I have attached two pictures for my visual aids. First picture is shows that section of track the is 18 feet long and was dead. It is the outside track that has the PC truck trailers. Its a loop that run all the way back to the transformer on each side of the grain elevator. Its a great size to park a long train and is my section #2. The second pic is of how I have my power set up. Everything has worked good until I started this thread about Gremlins, HA
 
More on the split switch

Turns out the car was derailed before it reached the turnout, it just piled up there. (This is why full scale railroads teach their people to not hang around near switches when a train is going through.)

I fixed it by elevating a spot on the outside rail that was lower than the rest of the curve. Two thicknesses of cardstock...

The whole section has been tweeked multiple times and it works better than ever, but the whole thing ought to be realigned. It's a bad combination of fairly short and variable radii, banking, at the top of a hill, with a turnout in the middle.

Someday...

I've concluded that gremlins are real, and that they have names. The first names vary, but the middle name is always "Obscure" and the last name is either "Misalignment" or "WheelIssue".
 
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